Where Wonders Surround You
by Paul Turounet
Online Exhibition with In-Person Programming
Studio Visits October 2025
Available Dates:
Wednesday, October, 8 | 7:00 pm
Saturday, October, 11 | 1:00 pm
Space is limited.
El Cajon studio address & parking instructions provided upon reservation.
Where Wonders Surround You by Paul Turounet is imagined as limited edition prints and an artist's book. The work travels through the conditions and consequences of climate change and global warming in the Southern California landscape. Turounet uses images, maps, and text adapted from an advertisement for the Ethyl Corporation in Sunset magazine in August 1962.
Between the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the Ethyl Corporation published a series of advertisements themed “The Magic Circles,” to promote their gasoline addictive products. Each advertisement included color photographs and a map. The complete suggested route encouraged families to take adventures in their car. Routes of adventure encircled such destinations as Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, Chicagoland, and New England. The Magic Circle of Southern California’s route connected the Pacific Ocean beaches of Los Angeles and San Diego with the Mohave Desert, Salton Sea, and Joshua Tree Monument. A generation later, Turounet travels to the sites of the “Magic Circle of Southern California” proposed by the Ethyl Corporation’s guide. The landscape has changed.
Today, Ethyl Corporation is one of five subsidiary companies of the new Market Corporation, specializing in petroleum and perfomacnce additives used in applications from personal automobiles to space launch and military defense. New Market had consolidated net sales revenue of $2.7 billion in 2023. Over the past 20 years (1984 - 2024), its stock price has risen 24,792%.
Paul Turounet
Somewhere Out There, Something is Happening
Artist’s Books
Where Wonders Surround You is part of a larger body of work, Somewhere Out There, Something is Happening. Currently represented by ten titles, Somewhere… is a sweeping study of the physical places and psychological spaces of the contemporary American social landscape. Turounet’s practice seeks to honor the history of a place through reflection and remembrance. To journey and pause in space is as much the locus of the artwork as the pilgrimage, or even the memorial created by the photograph. Image becomes artifact, which viewers may use to access and contemplate these same emotions and spaces. The Somewhere . . . oeuvre coalesces around three main themes: natural resources, land use, as well as climate and climate change; moments in history; the relationship of place to identity and gender.
© Stacy Keck, Weather on Steroids exhibition at the San Diego Central Library Gallery, 2017
Somewhere Out There, Something is Happening
- Price Structure -
Handmade Artist’s Books
14 x 11 in. | Ed. of 6 | $2,300
Contents vary by title: 6-12 inkjet photo prints, 5-6 text sheets, reflective statement, map, colophon, index in hand made paper custom clamshell case.
Limited Edition Prints
Bookplate: 14 x 11 in. | Ed. of 10 | $900 - $1,200
Standard: 25.25 x 17 in | Ed. of 5 | $1,800 - $2,500
XL: 60 x 44 in. | Ed. of 2 | $5,500 - $8,500
Questions | Acquisitions
About the Artist: Paul Turounet received his MFA in Photography from the Yale University School of Art in 1995. He has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and two grants from the Trans-Border Institute. He is most celebrated for work along the US-MX border (Tierra Brava, Bajo la Luna Verde, and Estamos Buscando A), which has exhibited predominantly across the southwestern United States and Mexico. Related handmade artist’s books have been recognized by the Humble Arts Foundation, Paris Photo – Aperture Foundation, and the New York Times.