Mark Guglielmo: Spirits in the Land

May 6 – June 26, 2022

Opening Reception: Fri, May 6th  –  5 to 7pm
Artist Talk: Sun, June 26th  –  6 to 7pm*   •  Optional Zoom Link for talk:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89781752427

From the Artist:
In late September 2019, I took a three-week pilgrimage to Sicily, intent on portraying my own culture and family history. My great grandparents were peasants from southern Italy who worked the land with their hands. They migrated to New York in the late 1890s, opened a produce stand in the Bronx and raised 14 children in 2 small rooms. A hundred some odd years later, as a storm cleared, I looked out over the crashing surf in Sicily and realized I’d come full circle.

These intergenerational, international connections inform my new series of collages I shot on my trip, my third to the island. Often painted and photo-transferred over large-scale photographic assemblages, this developing body of work addresses intersecting themes of memory, im/migration, shifting identity, and the imprinted legacies of my ancestors on the land they inhabited and the people that followed. It is also inspired by the rich multicultural tapestry of Sicilian life, where the history, music, cuisine, dialect and people itself are a blend of indigenous peoples (Sicani, Siculi and Elymians), Carthaginians (North Africans), Phoenicians (modern Lebanon), ancient Greeks, Muslim Moors, Jews, and Normans, among others.

Working with archival portraits of Southern Italians, before, during, and after migration, by such noted photographers as Letizia Battaglia and Lewis Hine, my creative process references the work of acclaimed African American artist Whitfield Lovell and the early photo-collages of David Hockney. I make my photo-collages by hand, taping together hundreds, sometimes thousands, of 4×6-inch close-up photographs I shoot with my smartphone or a small digital point and shoot camera. Neither a computer nor Photoshop are used.