La Cienega Area

A decade ago, Diane Blell was photographing her attractive self dressed to the nines in fashion magazine poses or nude, in ways that mingled art history references with unusual or deliberately commercialized settings. In her “Pursuit of Love” Cibachrome series of the mid-’80s, she continued to work in large-scale formats and her semi-nude models combine an airbrushed perfection with stagey, pseudo-classical poses in carefully decorated architectural spaces.

Her newest photographs are less resolved but more complex. “Circus Animals’ Desertion”--created by assembling elements of numerous Polaroid shots and retouching them with the help of computer technology--presents a disjointedly dreamy tableau in a fake outdoor setting.

Figures and other imagery in the Polaroids (some of which don’t find their way into the finished piece) seem half-remembered from art history books: a Gainsborough girl, a drapery-clad lady Poussin might have painted, a Velasquez dwarf, a Cezanne house. The process of adding, subtracting and reconfiguring imagery in each Polaroid variation of the scene is actually more compelling than the final large-scale version. (Gallery 454 North, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., to May 12.)