Does Yellow Run Forever?

Paul Graham

Paul Graham's Does Yellow Run Forever? is a series of photographs touching upon the ephemeral question of what we seek and value in life – love, wealth, beauty, clear-eyed reality, or an inner dream world?
The work weaves in and out of three groups of images: photographs of rainbows from western Ireland, a sleeping dreamer, and gold shops in the United States. The rainbows are beautiful phenomena, a conundrum that is both real and illusory. Chasing those rainbows to their end is supposed to lead to gold, found here metaphorically in the cheap gold and pawnshops of New York City, though these hardly seem the stuff of which dreams are made. Interspersed between these are photographs of a young woman, the artist’s partner, curled up asleep in various rooms. The imagery weaves us in and out of reality, dream and illusion, between fact and spectral phenomena, each entwined within the other.