Quartz Secrets: María DeGuzmán

Artist's Statement:

Echoes of Casablanca and Woman Seated in the Temple of the Cats are two photographs from an expanding series called Quartz Secrets. These particular photographs resulted from experimenting with clear quartz exposed to morning sunlight while placed on a hammered metallic plate. The refraction and diffraction occurring along with the miniature worlds suggested by this particular quartz piece’s inclusions and the surface of the plate produced complex imagery reminiscent of the object fragmentation and multiple perspectives of Cubism. Yet, unlike the two-dimensional flatness of much Cubist representation, these photographs evince some stereoscopic visual depth. They “blur the line” between Cubism and the Neo-Baroque and between minimalism and maximalism. The ensuing images constitute a sort of optical unconscious, what surpasses our ability to see in the moment, but that is, nevertheless, there, as the photographic process reveals. However, what is “there” involves continual interpretive perception on the part of viewers, myself included.

María DeGuzmán is a scholar, photographer, writer, and music composer. Her photographic work has been exhibited at The Institute of Contemporary Art (Boston, MA, USA), Watershed Media Centre (Bristol, England), and Golden Belt Studios (Durham, NC, USA). She has published photography in, among many other journals, Typehouse Literary Magazine, Phoebe, and New Delta Review. Her SoundCloud website may be found at: https://soundcloud.com/mariadeguzman.

Tout Nu

Don’t dream the way I dream. For it’s jest and lust, knots that seek

to u-n-r-a-v-e-l, f “ r” a” y” , drawn apart from being whole,

strung///////////////out, bared. Noose sprung.I fell in love to fall asleep.

Jonathan Memmert has poetry published in various journals and anthologies such as Anti Heroin Chic, Heavy Feather Review Side A, Vagabond City, Lone Mountain Literary Society, and Viridine Literary Journal among others. He has an MFA from The City College of New York. He is the associate editor for the online poetry journal for emerging poets, The Marbled Sigh. He currently lives in New York City.

and small birds

J.I. Kleinberg lives in Bellingham, Washington, USA, and on Instagram @jikleinberg. Chapbooks of her visual poems, How to pronounce the wind (Paper View Books) and Desire’s Authority (Ravenna Press Triple Series No. 23), were published in 2023; a full-length volume, She needs the river (Poem Atlas), was published in 2024. Other chapbooks include The Word for Standing Alone in a Field (Bottlecap Press, 2023) and Sleeping Lessons (Milk & Cake Press, 2025).