LOS ANGELES, CA.- Louise Alexander Gallery/AF Projects opened the first solo exhibition of LA based photographer Michele Asselin at AFP, entitled "Exposure" and featuring a body of new works.

The series featured in in the exhibit Exposure begins with two near-universal experiences: noticing sunlight on a wall, and staring, against all better judgment, straight into the sun.

The series draws on my past practice of seeking out the social meaning of built environments and revealing how spaces absorb traces of their occupants’ lives over time. With Exposure, however, I turned the lens on my own environment. Using natural light as technique and subject, the first set of images depict my own home, as well as a space in the desert in which I have spent significant time—looking at walls, isolating details, considering the past. In these interior photographs, I use sunlight as a guide, imaging only where it falls, and capturing the moment when direct sunbeams breach windows and doorways.

The series moved outdoors when wildfires erupted nearby. Thick, dense air blocked any sense of an expansive sky, so that being outside felt uncannily like being inside. The imagery created was both real and unreal, the mechanical version of staring into the sun. As the sky ranged day by day in color and density, so did the camera’s interpretation.

The juxtaposition of these two forms of sunlight considers our changing relationship to the natural world.

Michele Asselin is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work explores the impact of the social and physical environment on human experience. She draws on editorial techniques to examine how people and places come to reflect the systems of which they are a part. Asselin worked for the Associated Press in the Middle East while living in Jerusalem. Her portraiture has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Esquire, and New York Magazine among others. Asselin has been an artist-in-residence at the National Domestic Workers Alliance and collaborated on projects with social organizations Street to Home in New York City and The Institute for Facial Paralysis in Los Angeles. She has completed public art commissions in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and The City of Inglewood, California. She is the author of Clubhouse Turn (2020), published by Angel City Press.