UC San Diego

The exhibition A Natural History is comprised of two series of ambrotype and tintype photographs that depict fictional historical figures examining, ordering, and recording their worlds with a variety of different tools. These photographs were built from the ground up, from the construction of props to the staging and photographing of these scenes with nineteenth century technologies. In A Natural History a nineteenth century explorer is pictured alongside his collections of objects from the natural world as well as an elaborately constructed portable cabinet of curiosities. The photographs in The Expanse of a Fact exhibit the construction and display of a spherical moon sculpture and a diorama of the lunar surface. It visualizes a sequence of actions that mirror the production of the image series, thus producing an origin story about the creation of the work itself.