Noah Doely's ambrotype and tintype photographs are full fiction and illusion. Harkening back to a time at the emergence of photography, Doely presents characters that are in a pursuit of knowledge, making, and understanding, a search that belongs just as much to the artist as it does to these fictional personalities. His exhibition, The Expanse of the Fact, opens tonight, June 1, at Steve Turner Contemporary in Los Angeles.Noah Doely's ambrotype and tintype photographs are full fiction and illusion. Harkening back to a time at the emergence of photography, Doely presents characters that are in a pursuit of knowledge, making, and understanding, a search that belongs just as much to the artist as it does to these fictional personalities. The images are rich with detail, all entirely constructed and coordinated by Doely himself, a laborious process that delves just as much into the act of making as it does into the history it evokes.

"Created over the last three years, Noah Doely: The Expanse of a Fact features a series of ambrotype and tintype photographs generated with photographic tools and methods from the mid-19th century. These images document imagined spaces and pseudo histories that were crafted in a process incorporating aspects of sculpture, installation, performance and painting. The artist built sets and uses performers to enact a story that orbits around a central character– a bearded man from the past who both observes and creates. The photos show the man constructing and displaying a spherical sculpture of the moon and a diorama of the lunar surface. He makes these imagined structures based on a compulsion to gain access to distant realms, and this narrative in turn becomes folded into the artist's own near-manic preoccupation with the construction of that story. Thus is revealed a story-within-a-story complicating the viewer's perceptions of time, the central character, the artist and the facts."

Doely's photographs will be on view at Steve Turner Contemporary Gallery between June 1 - June 30, 2012 with an opening reception tonight, Friday June 1st from 7-9 PM. We say it's definitely worth a visit.



