From a certain vantage point inside Justin Brice Guariglia’s sprawling Brooklyn studio, it is nearly impossible to tell what exactly is hanging on the back wall. At a distance, the massive 16-foot print presents itself as a heavily textured painting, complete with jagged, physical edges that seem to invite the viewer to reach out and touch the topography. Upon closer inspection, however, the illusion shifts; the eye realizes that the image is entirely flat, functioning like a photograph rather than a canvas built up with thick layers of oil or acrylic paint. In reality, the visual trick—the trompe l’oeil—resides somewhere comfortably between the two distinct mediums. As the artist himself describes it, "They’re paintings derived from photographs."
This particular monumental work originates directly from Guariglia’s recent, high-altitude flight alongside NASA’s Operation IceBridge mission. It captures a striking, sobering shot of the Jakobshavn Glacier, which stands as Greenland’s largest and most rapidly melting mass of ice. The piece forms a central component of an extensive series of landscape prints that Guariglia has meticulously crafted for his upcoming exhibition, Earth Works: Mapping The Anthropocene. The show is scheduled to open its doors to the public at the Norton Museum of Art in Palm Beach, Florida, bringing urgent conversations about climate change and human impact straight to the gallery walls.
Guariglia’s journey to this intersection of fine art, environmental science, and advanced technology began years ago when he worked as a freelance magazine photographer traveling across Asia. Over a decade ago, he made a conscious and decisive switch to the world of fine art, driven by a growing frustration with the ephemeral nature of traditional publishing. Photographs printed in glossy magazines are routinely consumed, discarded, and thrown away within days or weeks; Guariglia wanted to create art that could endure, outlasting its creator and speaking to future generations. For his current exhibition, this desire led him to pioneer a complex process of printing his dramatic aerial photographs directly onto industrial-grade aluminum and polystyrene canvases.
Reflecting on the permanence of the medium contrasted against the rapid disappearance of the subject matter, Guariglia notes the irony and the profound statement behind the work. "The physical object in the photo is already gone," he remarks, pointing out how quickly the landscapes he documents are altering under the pressure of global warming. "But the actual image will last forever—as long as we don’t recycle it."
The source material for these striking works is gathered from staggering heights, typically captured at altitudes ranging anywhere from 1,500 all the way up to 40,000 feet. From these vantage points, everyday features of the landscape—whether it is the sprawling Asian countryside or the frozen, remote landmasses of the Arctic—are stripped of their familiar context and transformed into powerful abstract forms. Through Guariglia’s careful framing, ordinary agricultural farmland is visually transmuted into gilded geometries, while massive ancient glaciers are reduced to ambiguous, haunting vistas of stark white.
Many of the most compelling photographs featured in the exhibition were captured during his time embedded with the Operation IceBridge mission. This vital scientific initiative dispatches low-elevation research planes soaring over Greenland specifically to gather critical data on the country’s rapidly deteriorating glaciers and ice sheets. During these grueling, high-stakes flights, Guariglia would routinely lay prone at the very feet of the aircraft’s pilots, snapping thousands of photographs of the ever-changing, perilous landscape below through the specialized drop windows of the plane.
Back in his Brooklyn studio, Guariglia resists the urge to over-manipulate or digitally tinker with the images he brings back from the field. "I’m mostly just trying to reduce the image to its most basic essential form," he explains, favoring clarity and emotional resonance over artificial digital enhancements. To achieve this, he relies on a piece of machinery that functions essentially as his paintbrush: a massive, industrial-grade printer handmade in Switzerland that commands a price tag roughly equivalent to the cost of a "very nice" Brooklyn apartment.
This specialized printer operates by dispensing an extraordinarily fine layer of acrylic ink onto the chosen surface, immediately followed by powerful ultraviolet lights that instantly cure and bind the ink permanently to the material. While the machine is typically utilized in commercial industries for creating high-end signage and corporate displays, Guariglia pushes its capabilities far beyond standard manufacturing parameters. "I make it do things it’s not supposed to do," he says, describing how he forces the machine to print directly onto rigid polystyrene or lay down an astonishing 150 distinct layers of ink at a staggering 900 percent saturation level. Achieving these results has required immense dedication and experimentation; as the artist notes, "I’ve logged about 1,500 hours testing material and printing processes." The end result of this relentless technological tinkering is a photographic print that is engineered to effectively last forever, providing a permanent visual record despite the profound ephemerality of the melting natural world it depicts.
Every aspect of Guariglia’s artistic undertaking—from his overarching process and choice of subject matter to his specific selection of raw industrial materials—is deliberately chosen to represent the Anthropocene. This term defines the current, unofficial geological age in which human activity has become the dominant influence on Earth’s climate and ecosystems. The ultimate goal of the exhibition, as Guariglia explains it, is to actively implicate not just himself as an artist utilizing materials that will one day become a permanent part of the geological fossil record, but also every single viewer who stands before the work.
These monumental prints serve as a stark, unavoidable reminder to audiences that the massive environmental crises humanity currently faces are driven overwhelmingly by our own collective actions. Yet, by being captured through the camera lens, carefully cropped, and permanently printed onto rigid rectangular panels, these vast and terrifying global issues are brought into a human scale, making them at least a little easier to see, confront, and comprehend.
