Michele Asselin: Exposure

Exhibition Details

"Exposure" – December 5, 2021, to January 21, 2022

Opening Reception: December 12, 2–4 PM

Location: 7503 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles

Louise Alexander Gallery/AF Projects presents Exposure, the first solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based photographer Michele Asselin at AFP. The exhibition features a new body of work that explores light, space, and perception.

Exploring Light and Space

The Exposure series begins with two near-universal experiences: noticing sunlight on a wall and staring directly into the sun. These simple yet profound moments form the foundation of Asselin’s investigation into light as both subject and medium.

Asselin’s past work has focused on the social meaning of built environments, how spaces absorb traces of human presence over time. With Exposure, she turns the lens on her own surroundings, capturing fleeting moments when sunlight enters her home and a remote desert space she frequently inhabits. These images isolate details, tracing the past through shifting patterns of light.

From Interiors to Wildfire Skies

The series evolved when nearby wildfires transformed the sky. Thick smoke blurred the boundary between indoors and outdoors, creating an eerie, enclosed atmosphere. The resulting photographs, both real and surreal, offer a mechanical interpretation of looking into the sun, where color and density shift unpredictably. This juxtaposition of natural light in controlled interior spaces and an altered, smoke-filled sky reflects a changing relationship with the environment.

About Michele Asselin

Michele Asselin is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work examines the intersection of social and physical environments. She employs editorial techniques to explore how people and places reflect the systems they exist within.

Her background includes working for the Associated Press in the Middle East while living in Jerusalem. Her portrait photography 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 has collaborated with organizations such as 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 Inglewood, California. In 2020, she published Clubhouse Turn (Angel City Press), a photographic exploration of the closure of Hollywood Park Racetrack.