Wilshire Center

A dash of Man Ray’s zany surreal photo manipulations, a pinch of brave new world technology and a good bit of popular tabloid gimmickry imbue eerie Polaroid portraits by New Yorker Nancy Burson.

Trained as a painter, Burson became intrigued with translating photographed portraits into the digitized language of computers, hoping to mathematically manipulate--for instance, “age” or recombine--faces according to pre-set parameters and programs. Burson and husband collaborator David Kramlick patented the software to systematically “age” faces, making “People” magazine with geriatric versions of Lady Di and Brooke Shields and helping the FBI with “aged” composite photos of missing children.

Well and fine, but was it art? Burson’s mid ‘80s “Composites” established her among wry political-conceptual photographers such as Cindy Sherman. “Big Brother,” a computer combination of Mao, Hitler, Stalin, Khomeini and Mussolini, or “Warhead,” a hybrid of nuclear power leaders Thatcher, Brezhnev and Reagan, put a face on abstractions.

In this show Burson’s computer scrambling creates invented faces from the photographed features of two or more portraits of mostly children. She’s used Victorian period death portraits and photos of physically deformed children, mixed in with the heavily lashed, marble eyes or too perfectly formed porcelain features of play dolls. Once Burson achieves the computer image she’s after, she shoots black and white Polaroids straight from the monitor. The result is a macabre collection of innocents, victims and carnival freaks who test the membrane between real and fictional, tugging at our pathos, curiosity and repulsion as tangibly as if they lived next door. (Jan Kesner, 164 La Brea Ave., to Feb 18.)