JUXTAPOZ – Pia Paulina Guilmoth Magazine: Drink the river flowers
Clamp Oversee Flowers drink the riverSolo Gallery by Fall 2024, artist, Pia Polina Gilmouth – first with the exhibition. In this deep personal group of work, Guilmoth documents the first two years of her gender transition while living in a rural town mostly in Maine. Its images of great coordination reflect beauty and terrorism in a world in which strange presence in the turns of euphoria and deep dangers can be. Fill out with moths, snakes and owls, by raw rituals, which represent Guilmoth’s search for beauty, resistance, resistance amid wild landscapes and intimate relationships that determine her life.
The flowers, which drink the river, which extend to topics of transformation, belonging and challenge, extend from a poem for transit women, strange kinship, and survival of the working class in the back wood in the center of Maine. Guilmoth images reject an easy classification-interlocking bodies that are installed in the dark in the dark, spider silk spinning through incandescent landscapes, and night creatures move through the frame like calm witnesses. A burning house burning at the distance with a calm white horse, apparently unaware. Friends urinate from the branches of tree, such as warm summer rain. These images inhabit the distance between the earth and the body, pleasure and threats, inviting viewers to a world where the borders are unclear, and survival from the act of creation.
Guilmoth photographic practice is rooted in cooperation – with its human nationals and the natural world. It builds sensitive sculptures of spider, flowers, and other materials that were found, then wait where the environment interferes, and allows wind, water and light to reshape its books. This contemplative approach extends to its relationship with the animals that it depicts, and gained its confidence for weeks and months before taking its presence in the movie.
“Every night for a week in August, I was sitting on the tall grass behind the orchard, covered with the deadly killer gold, wearing a boiling suit, and grabbed a tray full of powdered apples in one hand and a confirmed shutter launch of 30 feet connected to a 4 x 5 camera in the other.” “The deer family itself was more comfortable with my presence every night. In the end, they were eating ripe fruits from my hand. On the next Tuesday, I had the first HRT consultation. I kept it secretly, knowing that I could not move safely in this place, but I could not also hide my changing body during the following months and years.”
The use of GUILMOTH for great photography is a technical and emotional choice, stressing patience, accuracy and physical participation with the broker. “I have always embraced slow in my life,” says Guilmoth. “In the place I live and the way I aspire to. Art and my presence with people I love are the things that really allow me to exist in a moment.” The complex process of creating each snapshot, from building confidence with wild creatures, reflects the most broader themes for their work: flexibility, adaptation, and searching for beauty in unbearable places.
In essence, the flowers drink a river challenging documentary imaging agreements. Instead of approaching its citizens as an outdoor, Guilmoth is photographing its community – and the strange people who move in life in an area that often prohibits their existence. The result is a group of work that resists the sauce, and instead, it offers an intimate and deeply calculated image of the chosen family, survival and joy. “Resistance to me says:” You can try to take everything from me – health care, safety, and affordable housing – but you cannot make my joy and ability to find beauty in my life, “she explained.
The exhibition is accompanied by a study of the same title published by Stanley Parker. All pictures of courtesy and owned by Pia Polina Gilmouth.
