Woman with a Vision Table

Vision Table & Other Images

This portfolio can also be viewed as a self-contained sequence of eight images unfolding a contemplative, mystical journey. I call this journey “Vision Table & Other Images.” I obtained these photographic images by stirring water around in a bowl with a spoon and photographing the interaction between sunlight, moonlight, and/or candlelight and the moving water. The resulting photographic images tend to be abstract with uncannily evocative figurative elements. The images are not manipulated. They result from the camera’s freezing of refractive and reflective patterns in the water swirling too quickly for the naked eye to grasp. These images constitute a sort of optical unconscious, what surpasses our ability to see in the moment, but that is, nevertheless, there, as the photographic process reveals. However, what is “there” involves continual acts of interpretive perception on the part of viewers.

Mist of Presences

Upturned Face

Wise Woman

Waterfall Oracle

Emergence

The Path

Blue Obscurity of the Future

In the artist’s words:

I am a literary scholar, a conceptual photographer, and a music composer / sound designer. My photographic work has been exhibited at The Carrack Gallery of Modern Art, Pleiades Gallery, and the Golden Belt Art Studios in Durham, North Carolina, 523 East Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough, North Carolina, the Joyner Library at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and Salisbury University Art Gallery in Salisbury, Maryland. It has also been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA) and Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England). In addition to three scholarly books on U.S. culture and LatinX literature – Spain’s Long Shadow (Minnesota Press, 2005), Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana Press, 2012), and Understanding John Rechy (University of South Carolina Press, 2019), I have published writing and photography in many literary journals, including Typehouse Literary Magazine, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts, Coffin Bell, Solstice Literary Magazine, Landlocked, and Mandorla: New Writing from the Americas.

My photographic work has also been displayed on the covers of scholarly books and books of poetry. Myriad influences and affinities inform my visual work. Chief among them are Leonardo da Vinci’s observations on and experiments with water, atmosphere, optics, and light & shadow; Spanish, Latin American, & LatinX baroque and neo-baroque aesthetics, Romanticism, American Luminism, Symbolism, and Surrealism.

My SoundCloud website may be found at: https://soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.