Leaving the shutter open in a darkened room, she uses flashlights like paintbrushes, colored light like paint to capture her subjects posing on the quintessential couch.
The result is dynamic, atmospheric, even surreal portraits presented through vivid light and stark shadows.
Traveling East
Ms. Floreks new series of photo-based monoprints combines portraits, modern advertising images and regional settings photographed during her recent travels in Vietnam.
Ms. Floreks jumping off point is with the faces of Asian women, which she finds evocative and compelling. She places these figures in invented backgrounds to portray them in a far different context.
In these new juxtapositions of such a disparate culture to her own Western origins, Ms. Florek explores the ascribed notions of womens identity, questioning with compassion what beauty means, what cultural roles are, where strength lies and what loss looks like.
Elevating the Mundane
Ms. Nathan is a raconteur of sorts, making mixed media, photo-based works on paper that weave tales of ordinary characters in ordinary moments.
In one series, she begins with evidence left behind long discarded police mugshots and miniscule photos of miscellaneous figures, enlarged and recontextualized to describe hypothetical histories and absorbing narratives.
In another series, Ms. Nathan, working from her own photographs of figures jumping in mid-air, takes a disarming and unpretentious act and playfully manipulates gestures in free form space.
TAG, The Artists Gallery, 2903 Santa Monica Blvd., at Yale. Hours: 11 to 5, Tuesday through Saturday. 310.829.9556. Email: theartistsgallery@verizon.net. www.TAGTheArtistsGallery.com.