Pia-Paulina Guilmoth’s Flowers Drink the River reveals a dreamscape where mud, earth and stone envelop, and the forest floors are wet with glowing dew. Using a large format camera and careful analogue techniques, Pia finds an entrancing, mystical presence in her daily experiences amidst the forests, fields, and rivers of her home. Pia’s hazy images, filled with light aberrations and glowing spectres, leave us suspended mid-ritual.
Flowers Drink the River spans the first two years of Pia’s gender transition, as she photographs her small community in rural Maine, and the beauty and terror of living as a trans woman in a small right-wing town. Scenes of moths and floating spider silk, mud-drenched bodies intertwining, a burning house, girlfriends pissing on each other from tree branches, nocturnal animals, and euphoric rituals adorn flash-soaked landscapes. Under the moon, the boundaries between people, animals, and the land soften and blur. Flowers Drink the River is an animistic search for beauty, resistance, safety, and magic in a world often devoid of these things. It’s a love note to rural working-class people, trans women, lesbians, queer people and the backwoods of central Maine. Pia finds beauty and belonging as she creates a utopia hidden just barely out of reach.