For Portland-based mixed media artist Ebenezer Galluzzo, photography is a conversation about identity, belonging, and our relationship with the landscapes we inhabit. His creative process begins with the camera but rarely ends there.
“It’s mixed media, using the photographic process as the starting point,” Galluzzo says. “It usually turns into some form of collage, using primarily my photographs to collage with.”
Galluzzo’s work often blends human forms with elements of the natural world, creating layered cyanotype prints that explore the relationship between body, identity, and place. “Do I have the agency to be free in my own body?” he asks. “Especially when as a trans person, you get a certain amount of rhetoric about being ‘unnatural’ or being ‘other.’”
Galluzzo’s creative process is also rooted in both environmentalism and lived experience. “I found in my younger years, there was definitely an idea of otherness and that we as humans are a bad influence on the landscape,” he recalls. “It was later, after having my own gender experience, I was like, that doesn’t create a great relationship, does it?”
In his collages, he interweaves hands, faces, and other body parts with local plants, lichen, and other organic shapes, forming “a shape that seems to fit and feel the most affirming for me or the other person.”
That intertwining, he says, “Opens a different conversation with belonging. When you feel that you belong to a landscape, when you feel that you belong to a place, you are more inclined to be a better steward, because you have a relationship of dual acceptance.”
Galluzzo’s recent work shifted from self-portraiture to photographing others, particularly members of the trans and queer communities. The response, he says, is profound: “It feels like it resonates in a deeper way with other people from the queer and trans community. At a show I recently had, there were a lot of really lovely, beautiful, vulnerable tears. I think somebody said… ‘Wow, this really is for us.’”
There is, he adds, “always an element of sacredness to it… either healing and or affirming for people to see themselves kind of abstracted, and not like in a documentary journalist way, but in a celebratory, peaceful, organic, kind of abstract sort of way.”
This September, Galluzzo has a residency at Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts & Agriculture in Sisters, Oregon. He will focus on creating cyanotype 2D collages, an early photographic process that can be exposed with natural sunlight.
Galluzzo’s time at the ranch will also connect directly with the community through two events. On September 13 (10 a.m.–1 p.m.), he will lead a Holobiont Quilting Bee, continuing a community quilt project he began in 2023 for Portland Textile Month.
On September 18 (4–6 p.m.), Galluzzo, Beth Alvarado and Mychelle Moritz will open their studios to the public for an Open Studio, offering a behind-the-scenes look at his process and works-in-progress.
Galluzzo, also extends an open invitation: “If you are a member of this community and interested in being photographed for future collage work, feel free to reach out.”
