SPIRITS IN THE LAND

PRESS RELEASE

Vermont Center for Photography is pleased to present Mark Guglielmo: Spirits in the Land, curated by Joshua Farr, a new exhibition of painted large-scale photocollages of Sicily, running from May 6—June 26, 2022. In a follow-up to his Cuba series, it is the New York-born artist’s first exhibition at VCP.

In September 2019, Guglielmo took a three-week pilgrimage to Sicily, his third trip to the island. He went intent on portraying his own culture and family history. His great grandparents were peasants from southern Italy who worked the land with their hands. They migrated to New York City in the late 1890s, opened a produce stand in the Bronx and raised 14 children in 2 rooms. 

An antiquated and laborious method, Guglielmo makes his photocollages by hand, taping together hundreds of individual 4x6-inch photographs he shot on his Sicilian sojourn. He visited Palermo, Siracusa, Trapani, Erice, and Scopello, and captured dozens of landscape and village scenes using a small, handheld digital point-and-shoot camera and sometimes his smartphone. Aiming the lens in different directions, and moving as he goes, he compiles fragmented, close-up detail images of his subject from multiple angles. Once home, he gets prints made by a lab using a traditional chemical process and begins to assemble each piece in the studio layering, positioning, and re-positioning, one photo next to another until he arrives at a balanced composition.

Then, working with archival black and white photographs of Southern Italians as references by such noted photographers as Letizia Battaglia and Lewis Hine, Guglielmo, for the first time, painted and photo-transferred portraits onto his mural-size photographic assemblages to address intersecting themes of memory, vulnerability, im/migration, identity, and the imprinted legacies of his ancestors on the land they inhabited and the people that followed. 

His creative process was informed by the work of Sicilian artist Andrea Chisesi, whom he met on his trip, acclaimed African American artist Whitfield Lovell and the photocollages of David Hockney from the 1980s. The work is also inspired by the multicultural, rich tapestry of Sicilian life, where the history, culture, music, 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.