AGENTIC FORESTS

Agentic Forests is a series of large-scale pictures in acrylic on white gessoed linen that depict primal forest ecosystems as agentic: not objects, but as subjects that far exceed human comprehension. The works embody our dialectical blindness and entanglement with these living systems in the same frame.

Begun some fifteen years ago, this series explores primal old growth forests around the world, inch by inch, through a process that captures and collapses dozens of focal planes into a single field of space and time, resulting in a visual density that overwhelms the eye and directly challenges our sense of human exceptionalism. 

Guariglia shifts each picture into the ultraviolet spectrum, flooding the field with violets, cyans, magentas, and spectral whites. While the gesture references the UV-sensitive vision of birds and insects, it more importantly allows the viewer to slip into a more-than-human Umwelt, forging a sensory encounter with a foreign intelligence most of us may have never experienced before.

The largest works are immersive thirteen-foot murals, their foliage close to human scale. Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, Washington (2026) is a dense network of white forms that cascade and germinate across the surface, tinged with purple. The field is ontologically flat, having no foreground, no background, no center, no edge. The forest is rendered uncannily familiar – their shapes and structures are known – yet their rich complexity feels alien.

But agency is not ours alone. It runs through everything living and nonliving, each thing shaping the next. The forest operates at temporal and spatial scales we cannot perceive, and withdraws from us; no single view can contain the whole. The result is a blind spot – we mistake a sessile world for a still one. Yet the forest is vibrantly alive – sensing, communicating, remembering – and in doing so, becomes an actant, shaping everything in reach. New science shows us that the forest passes signals between members and across species, in a language we are only now learning to read.

Guariglia's pictures explain none of this. They do not show a place; they put you inside a sapient system so vast and intertwined, so unlike anything we know, that the act of comprehension breaks down, leaving the viewer only able to sense. The work is a reminder that our eyes are only one narrow way of perceiving this world we are so thoroughly entangled with and deeply estranged from.