U.S – Mexico Border, Tijuana, Mexico, 2002
For the past 30 years, Paul Turounet’s practice has applied the strategies of photography, writing, sculpture, installation, and artist books. The work adapts form to explore and personalize an expansive range of subjects with a neutrality that hovers outside the social, cultural and political implications that it addresses. Our personal and collective psychologies are confronted in the physical landscapes of history, culture and the environment.
Perspective is apt to shift. The abstract tends to seem clear and definitive. Reality can be more subtle, ambiguous and open to a greater interpretation.
Series Highlights
Somewhere Out There, Something Is Happening – ongoing series of artist books of photographs and fragmentary text, meditating on the physical places and psychological spaces of the social scene in the United States, including Little Big Horn & Wounded Knee, the Manzanar War Relocation Center, voting rights movement in Philadelphia, Mississippi, aftermath of JFK assassination in Dallas, the effects of an EF-5 tornado in Joplin, the Pulse Nightclub tragedy in Orlando, and clear-cutting old growth forests in Oregon.
Beneath the Dirt of Great Men – photographs and sculpture examining the transformation of the petroleum landscape in the Permian Basin of Texas and the impending climate challenges.
Gardens of Paradise – large-scale photographs that delve into the promises of cheap companionship and fantasy advertised on the seductive escort cards of women that eventually become discarded and submerged in the symbols of extravagance and vanity of the fountains along the Las Vegas Strip.
Estamos Buscando A – a 15-year long series of intimate portraits and landscape photographs and narrative texts, witnessing the migrant experience in Mexico along the U.S. – Mexico border, including site-specific installations on the border wall in Tijuana, a self-published migrant guide book, and culminating in an immersive gallery installation with a 64-foot long x 12-foot high border wall that foresaw and realized the increasing nationalistic tone that was being established by the Trump Administration.
Tierra Brava – traverses a personal psychological space within the color of a place mired in contradictions, the U.S. – Mexico border, a place that is in a constant search for its own sense of identity, juggling the traditions of culture and history of the interior with the pleasures and promises of prosperity and a better life of its northern neighbor.
Exhibition Highlights
Extraction: An Expansive Survey of Land Use Through the Lens of Consumption
New Mexico Highlands University, Las Vegas, New Mexico, 2022
University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, 2021
Transborder Biennial 2018 | Bienal Transfronteriza 2018
El Paso Museum of Art, El Paso, Texas
Museo de Arte de Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico
Estamos Buscando A – Border Wall Installations
Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona, 2017
New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, 2015
Mesa College, San Diego, California, 2013
University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona, 2011
West Chester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania, 2009
University of San Diego, San Diego, California, 2006
Site-Specific Installations, U.S. – Mexico Border Wall, Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico, 2002 – 2004
Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards 2016
Aperture Foundation, New York City, New York
Ivorypress, Madrid, Spain
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Locle, Switzerland
Landskrona Foto Festival, Landskrona, Sweden
Lumière Brothers Center for Photography, Moscow, Russia
Lesley University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Gardens of Paradise
jdc Fine Art, San Diego, California, 2014
Tierra Brava
Regis University, Denver, Colorado, 2014
University of Texas at Brownsville, Brownsville, Texas, 2013
University of San Diego, San Diego, California, 2000
University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, Texas, 1998
Centro Cultural Tijuana, Baja California Norte, Mexico, 1998
Museo de Arte El Chamizal, Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, 1998
Collections
Aperture Foundation
California Museum of Photography
Carleton College, Gould Library Special Collections
Colorado College, Charles L. Tutt Library Special Collections
Cranbrook Academy of Art Library
DePaul University Special Collections
Museum of Photographic Arts at the San Diego Museum of Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art Library
Scripps College, Denison Library Special Collections
Stanford University, Gunst Special Collection and Bowes Art & Architecture Library Collection
University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library Pictorial Collections
University of California, Riverside, Special Collections
University of California, Santa Cruz, McHenry Library, Special Collections
University of Chicago, Special Collections, Rare Books
University of Cincinnati, Elliston Poetry Collection
University of Southern California, Special Collections
University of Utah, Marriott Library Special Collections
Utah State University, Merrill-Cazier Library Special Collections
University of Wisconsin – Madison, Special Collections
Yale University Art Gallery
Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University, Haas Family Arts Library Special Collections
Born in 1962 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Paul Turounet earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from San Jose State University in 1985 and his Master of Fine Arts – Photography degree from Yale University in 1995. He received a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Fellowship in 1997, and grants from the TransBorder Institute at the University of San Diego in 2003 and 2004.
His self-published book, Estamos Buscando A – We’re Looking For, was shortlisted and a runner-up for the 2016 Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award, and was also selected as one of ten books for the New York Times – The Best Photo Books of 2016.
Since 2005, he has been a Professor of Photography at Grossmont College and previously taught at the University of San Diego and the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente in Guadalajara, Mexico for the University of San Diego’s Guadalajara Summer Program. He currently resides in San Diego, California.
Download CV
Studio: paul.turounet@gcccd.edu
.
Gallery Representation
Paul Turounet Interview with Abbey Hepner
Conversation about photographing in Mexico along the U.S. – Mexico border for nearly 20 years, including Tierra Brava and Estamos Buscando A, and what happens when observation leads to the transformation of the photographer’s beliefs and values.
.
.