Noelle K. Tan, Tour Bus. 16″ x 20″ silver gelatin print. Courtesy of Civilian Art Projects.

What does America look like in the twenty-first century? One stark answer is suggested by Noelle Tan’s The America Project: Utopia at Civilian Art Projects.

A curatorial essay connects Tan’s black and white work with precursors who shared her creative urge to visually catalogue the human experience: Robert Frank’s The Americans — the photographic document of the middle twentieth century; Edward Steichen’s exhibit The Family of Man, a multi-photographer survey, first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1955; and most recently, Gerhard Richter’s Atlas, a massive archive of photographs and ephemeral materials, such as the photos of the Baader-Meinhof group that inspired his landmark painting cycle October 18, 1977. These influences are clearly seen in Tan’s work, but the artist is not merely standing on their august shoulders. Tan brings something to her images that makes it her own: a dry sense of humor.