LOST CREEK / Land Study #2
Solo Exhibition Escape Artist Studios Las Vegas, Nevada Piezography Prints 2015 - 2021
Challenging the static photographic landscape, Lost Creek examines the movement of natural forces. Photographed in a dried creek in the Mojave Desert, these images ask us to infer a once active niche. Through a custom-built medium format rangefinder using the process of multiple exposure, layers of monochromatic stills imply geographic forces: rock, water, and carbon cycles push and pull in symbiotic formation. Questioning our perception of geographical time through blended exposure, Lost Creek shows more than the culmination of divergent forces; it reveals the churn of a living world - breathing, growing, diminishing, and repeating.
VIRGO
Solo Exhibition Escape Artist Studios Las Vegas, Nevada Light Chamber, Type IV/ SX-70 film 2019
In Virgo, I argue the photograph functions as a living tool, allowing us both to remember, and to call into question perceivable time and space. We see evidence of this duality in all forms of motion: for example, sound frequencies, although initiating at some specific point in time, continue to travel throughout our cosmos as new formations, seemingly rewriting our understanding of physical law. In this way, sound waves and light waves are one and the same; while expressed through specific moments in time, both forms of motion continually exist as new formations. Just as sound waves travel millions of miles throughout our galaxy - reaching new planets, local group clusters, even to the ends of the conceivable universe (i.e. the Virgo Supercluster), light waves expel notions of linear evolution. Thus, through the photograph, specifically candid photography, we are forced to consider alternative outcomes of light and physical space, we are left to hypothesize the cosmological fluidity of moment, and we are encouraged to see beyond the singularity of our own existence.
Protesters
Solo Exhibition South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center South Bend, Indiana Gelatin Silver Prints 2010
Influenced by Eric Etheridge’s documentary Beach of Peace, and the South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center Oral History Project , Paul Guillaume’s “Protesters” confronts the difficult past of racial inequity. Focusing his narrative of the segregated Engman Natatorium in South Bend, Indiana, Guillaume photographs those Civil Rights leaders who fought for equal access . In its’ heated Jim Crow atmosphere of 1931, the division among Engman’s future drove legislation to ban segregated public spaces. Engman, now serving as South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center, also houses Guillaume’s photographs of those who fought for that ideological transformation.
NEVER LET ME GO: MEMORY LOSS AND THE ARCHIVE
Solo Exhibition New England School of Photography Boston, Massachusetts Light Chamber Exposure, Type II Provia 100F 4x5 2014
A New Orleans native, Guillaume began to question the material photograph after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Left only with his grandmother’s heavily damaged photographic archive, he started to see its’ molded paper as representational. These moments seemingly erased - blurred faces, script notes worn, once vivid memories melted between Mississippi River water and aged glue – instead highlighting a communal experience; one in which those who experience loss are encouraged to erase memory. Conversely, Never Let Me Go: Memory, Loss, and the Archive re-appropriates the family memento, attempting to find blended commonalities among loss, and ultimately methods of memory permanence.
MY FATHER’S WAR
Light Chamber, Type III 4x5 Provia 100F film 2017
Re-purposing the last few undamaged Kodachrome slides from Paul-Jude father's tour in the Vietnam War, he revisits the drama his father has been unable retell since his time as a solider. Through the documentation of his father's own camera lens, Paul-Jude re-imagines the contextual hue of his father's war-torn and suppressed memory, in search of whatever may have been left behind.