Paul Thulin

Pine Tree Ballads

July 1 - September 1, 2016

In the early 1900s, my great-grandfather settled on an island off the coast of Maine because it resembled his homeland of Sweden. As a result, my family has returned to Gray's Point each summer for over a century. Throughout his life he shared exquisitely detailed accounts of the early settlers of the New England apple orchard farm that included such characters as a one-legged ship cook, a widowed schoolteacher, and an ingenious Native American blacksmith. The tales were an intricate mix of facts and lore that fueled my imagination and often had the power to transform floorboard creaks and shadows into enduring ancestral spirits. My decade long photographic project Pine Tree Ballads is a poetic memoir that embraces this spirit of magic realism.

At Gray’s Point, stories have arisen from the mouths of both the young and old that over time have become an ever present narration of the landscape. Each generation thrives on creating and performing anecdotes, legends, and rumors that contribute to an evolving mythology interweaving past and present. The tales transform the shore, ladders, pine trees, boots, granite, stoves, stars, and gusting winds from merely natural and physical elements of the environment into the symbolic essence of my family. This deeply personal photographic sequence is my folktale; a story infused with both imagination and reality which, in most instances, are the true ingredients of history.

Pine Tree Ballads is my attempt to advance a new “docu-literary” photographic aesthetic that celebrates and fully exploits the duplicitous nature of photography/text to be simultaneously interpreted as both fact and fiction. By interweaving various modes of analog and digital production, intentionally using titles as narrative subtext, and adopting an intuitive poststructuralist style of representation, the project explores the emotive, conditional, and material constructs of history, culture, personal identity, memory, and folklore. The series is made with a variety of photo-based processes and consists of over 100 Archival Pigment prints in sizes ranging from 8"x10" to 36"x40” and has been exhibited in several iterations such as traditional photography, video, and installation.

ABOUT THE ARTIST: Paul Thulin’s photographs have been exhibited nationally and internationally at United Photo Industries, NYC; Miami Scope; Candela Gallery, Richmond Va.; Chicago Art Fair; PPAC, Philadelphia; AAC, Washington DC; Toronto Art Fair, Foto Gallery, Barcelona; the C4FAP Portfolio Showcase, Colorado; Mt. Rokko Photography Festival, Japan; FIF_BH- International Festival of Photography, Brazil; and the Noordelicht Photo Festival, The Netherlands. Thulin has been the recipient of a variety of photographic prizes and awards including a 2001 TPI National Graduate Fellowship, a 2006 Virginia Commission for the Arts Artist Fellowship, 2013 Conveyor Magazine Exhibition Grant, 2015 Hariban Award Honorable Mention, 2015 Critical Mass Top 50, and the 2015 Lensculture Emerging Talent Grant. Most recently, his series Pine Tree Ballads was one of ten emerging talent portfolios selected for GUP magazine’s (NLD) tenth anniversary issue. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia and works as the Graduate Director of the Department of Photography and Film at Virginia Commonwealth University. https://www.paulthulin.com/