Nationality American Period Contemporary art Role Visual Artist | Name Justin Guariglia Movement Contemporary Art | |
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Born 1974 ( 1974 ) Maplewood, New Jersey Education Liberal Arts at Wake Forest Website | ||
Known for Visual arts, Photography | ||
Justin Brice Guariglia at EXPO Chicago 2018
Justin Brice Guariglia (b. 1974) is a New York-based contemporary visual artist who regularly collaborates with philosophers and scientists to unearth the complexities of our rapidly changing world.
Contents
- Justin Brice Guariglia at EXPO Chicago 2018
- Education
- Work
- Awards and nominations
- TV
- Personal life
- Exhibitions
- Residencies Fellowships Collaborations
- Collections
- References
His use of materials, processes, and scale, inform and shape his work, forging new ways of seeing and experiencing the world around us. The work walks the line between photography and painting. Derived from photographs, his painterly surfaces combine highly detailed aerial landscape images, with acrylic inks, unique materials, and innovative printing processes he’s pioneered.
Guariglia's artist intervention selfie app After Ice, which visualizes sea level rise received 13 million impressions on the iTunes store in its first week.
He lives and works in New York City.
Education
Guariglia grew up next to the home of Hudson River School painter Asher B. Durand, one of America's foremost landscape painters of the 19th century. He went on to study Italian art history under the late art historian Terisio Pignatti in Venice, Italy, before moving to Beijing, China in 1996 to study Chinese language, culture, and history at Capital Normal University. In 1997, he returned to the USA to finish his degree at the liberal arts college Wake Forest, before returning to Asia.
Guariglia lived in Asia for nearly 20 years, residing in Beijing, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Taipei and Shanghai, first as a student, then as a foreign correspondent and documentary photographer. From 2000 - 2008, Guariglia was a member of the photojournalism agency Contact Press Images, an agency known for representing photographers devoted to life long projects. He regularly traveled across Asia on reporting assignments for publications like the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic, Far Eastern Economic Review, Time Magazine, and Maclean's documenting a rapidly changing Asia.
Work
Contemporary archaeological in nature, Guariglia's work serves as a contemplative look at human kind's path towards accelerated modernization, also called by scientists "The Great Acceleration"; from the genesis of a raw and natural world to a civilization reaching the point of a questionable decline.
The images play with scale and perspective, often employing a "gaze from nowhere" aesthetic, and printed in grand scales of 4m to 5m in size. Following a long history of painters, he uses unconventional materials and printing techniques to make his work, pushing the images into the realm of painting, print making and sculpture. Many of the printing processes are complex, unique and developed in his studio, and undergo rigorous archival stability tests.
In 2015 Guariglia began flying a series of missions with NASA scientists in order to make images of rapidly changing glacial land and sea ice on and around Greenland to use as source material in his work, along with working with the scientists to develop a greater understanding of human impact on the ice.
Guariglia coined and trademarked the term "Plasticene™ printing" in 2016, whereby a plastic-like hyperarchival acrylic polymer ink is laid down in multiple layers, which enters itself into the fossil record upon production, due to the long half-life of the material. Occasionally Guariglia will layer the ink so thick that it forms a 3-D image. The name Plasticene™ is a nickname for the Anthropocene due to the large amounts of plastic in the fossil record of the Anthropocene.
On Earth Day of 2017, Guariglia launched After Ice, an artist intervention iOS selfie app that localizes, personalizes and visualizes sea level rise. Inspiration for the app came to Guariglia after flying multiple NASA earth science missions over Greenland with NASA scientists, and talks with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies scientist and expert on sea level rise Cynthia E. Rosenzweig. The app walks the user through three sea level rise scenarios, using projections from the NPCC and NASA, and was featured on the iTunes store by Apple and received 13 million impressions in the first week. The app was a collaboration between Guariglia, developers Aaron & Adam Fothergill in the U.K., publisher Ian Lynch Smith in Brooklyn, NY, and designer Frances Segismundo from Hong Kong.
Guariglia is currently exploring the science of the Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission at NASA/JPL working closely with NASA/JPL OMG Principle Investigator, Josh Willis Ph.D. The project is privately funded by grants and donations, and does not receive any financial support from NASA, JPL or OMG.
Awards and nominations
Guariglia was named a Howard Foundation Fellow in Photography at Brown University for 2017-2018, and a 2017 Simons Foundation Fellow @New Lab.
Guariglia has been nominated for the International Center of Photography's "Young Photographer of the Year Award", the Sovereign Asian Art Prize - Sovereign Art Foundation, named by the Fotofest Biennale a "Discovery of Fotofest,", chosen by Photo District News as one of the top "30 Young Photographers Under 30", and was a recipient of the Eddie Adams Workshop Newsweek award.
Guariglia's documentary work won several Pictures of the Year awards, including two awards in POYi60 in the General Division/Science/Natural History Picture Story & Single Image categories, and an additional award in POYi65 in the General News Reporting category.
TV
In 2007, Guariglia appeared in a TV series with music legends Lou Reed and Tony Visconti discussing the Shaolin Temple project and book on the Voom Network Gallery HD series entitled "Aperture." The series was nominated for a New York Emmy Award in 2009
Personal life
Guariglia is an avid runner and has raced in the TMBT 100 km Ultra-Trail Marathon in Borneo (an Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc qualifying race); the Mount Kinabalu International Climbathon (Skyrunner World Series event); the Kyoto Marathon; Taroko Gorge International Marathon; the Bali Half Marathon; and numerous mountain races across Asia.
On August 29, 2016, in commemoration of the International Geological Congress voting 30 to 3 in favor of formally designating the Anthropocene, the artist had NASA’s GISTEMP (global temperature anomalies 5-year mean) index tattooed onto his arm, on the day of the announcement.
Exhibitions
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Selected Group Exhibitions
Residencies, Fellowships & Collaborations
Collections
Guariglia's work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Norton Museum of Art, The Spurlock Museum, Urbana, Illinois, and numerous other private collections.