"Paul Guilmoth’s At Night Gardens Grow is an elegy to a queer world that rests between the personal landscapes of home, and the ubiquitous terrains of identity." At Night Gardens Grow is about the island it was created on, just as much as it’s about the interior worlds we carry with us.
Combining carefully crafted large-format photographs with more impulsive documentary photographs, Guilmoth moves through the found and fabricated landscapes of somewhere that’s never quite fixed or distinguished, but palpably familiar.
"These photographs have one foot in modern America and the other in a land of the past—haunted by the ghosts.
Any clear sense of locality is lost in favour of a more fluid and universal language of symbols and stories. A duality exists in this place that has both a desire to preserve, and an instinct to shed its skin, exposing a burgeoning folkloric force at work beneath its surface.
From baptisms, monuments of spider-silk, funerals, house-fires, holes carved in rock, and birth: At Night Gardens Grow is about stories that are as fragile as the world they’re built on.
Press release:
Guardian : Step into the night: American dreamscapes
