Loudly Whispering: The Photography of Noelle K. Tan

As exemplified in her Creative Capital premiere exhibition from here to the Salton Sea, through years of experimentation and hours in the darkroom, Noelle K. Tan has learned where to find the image, how to get ahead of it with equipment and film, and work it through to successful completion.

Utilizing traditional shooting and darkroom processes, she employs old-school gelatin-based film and rolls of fiber-based photographic paper. Each image is considered through variables such as over exposing the negative, under exposing the print, and dodging out unnecessary elements. Some things, in the words of the artist, just fall out of the frame.

To find the images, Noelle must journey beyond her home on the East Coast. Preferring the blank slate of the desert, she travels to the southwest and other wide-open spaces finding scenes such as a fire in the desert, a shelter in the middle of nowhere, a kite in the sky, and windmills on an elevated a pass in California near where she spent her graduate school years at CalArts.

Like those of us trying to edit things out of our life to get back to our roots, the work is a slow meditation in a time of rapid exchange. Yet, unlike meditation when emotions flow in and out, the work asks you to reflect upon their emotional weight, observing its conversation. Like Barnett Newman's epic series of paintings The Stations of the Cross, the series creates a space of openness, saying something only audible through effort and concentration.

Due to an unyielding vision and an uncompromising work ethic, Noelle's images are focused, expansive, and incredibly crafted. Without color, they are rich with something reflected by the absence of saturation, a beautiful reminder that we must pass through some things to find balance.

Pursuing the basic elements of earth, fire, air, and water, Noelle's images are essential. There is something urgent and perhaps eternal about the series, loudly whispering fables of provisions needed for a journey across the plains.

According to Philip Brookman, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, "these works are not about defining what we see in our everyday encounters with the landscape. They are about the radiance of our experiences out there."

Highly meditative and very communicative, the series says something certain and mutable, a pleasant contradiction that opens space for other thought. And like light that slowly enters consciousness, they share their intention, greeting and waking us.

-- Jayme Allison McLellan, 2007