Artist: Justin Brice Guariglia

Flowers Gallery presents Agentic Forests, the first solo London gallery exhibition by New York-based artist Justin Brice Guariglia.

A series of large-scale pictures printed in acrylic on white gessoed linen canvases, the works rigorously depict infinitely complex forest ecosystems, asserting the forest as agentic - a subject, not an object - that far exceeds human comprehension. Where contemporary environmental rhetoric tends to reduce the natural world to either something to be protected or something to be mined for resources, Guariglia's Agentic Forests proposes a richer relation that foregrounds our entanglement with and estrangement from the natural world.

Over the past fifteen years, Guariglia has visited hallowed and sacred forests from all corners of the globe. He employs a meticulous process to photograph the forests, inch by inch, collapsing dozens of exposures into a single visual plane. The fastidious work gives the pictures an almost etching- or woodblock-like feel. Guariglia then chromatically shifts each picture into the ultraviolet spectrum, radically altering the colours to unsettle expectations of these spaces - flooding them with violets, cyans, magentas, and spectral whites. The subversive gesture references the tetrachromatic UV vision of birds and insects, opening our eyes to a non-human Umwelt.

At nearly nine feet high, Hoh Rain Forest, Olympic National Park, Washington (2026) presents a network of white shapes that cascades and germinates across the composition, tinged with various purples. Standing before the work, the viewer is immersed in a beautiful web of clear visual information with no beginning or end. The wild space is made uncanny - at once familiar and distant. Even if one has never been to this exact forest, the iconography is known, yet its presence here makes us question our assumptions about it.

Philosopher Graham Harman's flat ontology has been a touchstone for Guariglia's practice. Harman holds that no being on earth occupies a more privileged place than any other. The same is true of perception: no species inhabits the world from a privileged vantage. The pictures hold both positions at once. Human and machine vision are merely two modes of seeing among many. Playing against the standard apparatus of photography, the work produces creative, unfixed meanings. Its polysemic nature mirrors its form: there is no visual or thematic hierarchy.

Robin Wall Kimmerer's writings on animacy - rooted in Indigenous cosmologies - have been similarly formative. Animacy holds that subjects, not objects, populate the living world: a position that years of scientific research now corroborate, demonstrating the forests' ability to communicate, remember, and make decisions. Contemporary anthropology has shown further that they engage in semiotic processes, exchanging meaning across species and substrates.

For Guariglia, ecology is not simply a theme but a methodology. Designed to minimise ecological impact, the works can be rolled, transported in tubes and installed directly onto the wall without framing or glazing. In avoiding the material demands of traditional crating, shipping, display and storage, the work extends Guariglia's environmental concerns beyond representation and into the practical life of the pictures themselves.

Agentic Forests previews a forthcoming travelling museum show to be announced in Autumn 2026.