Santa Monica

Pluralist experimentation has hit photography in a big way. Sheila Pinkel uses some state-of-the-art gadget called a digitized scanner that works like a Xerox but copies actual objects, recording with expressive imprecision details of contour and volume. The touch of a button enlarges or shrinks images to taste. Pinkel produces copies of all sorts of flora, fauna and bric a brac, makes 4x5-inch negatives of the most effective ones, then prints these in 12-inch-long rectangular formats.

The artistry comes in when she arranges these prints into neat grids creating large scale composite scenes of sea horses, flower pedals, rubber baby dolls, the undersides of crustaceous beetles mixed with oversized, abstracted views of the artist’s hands, face and feet. As in her early Xerox art, an image begins in one quadrant only to be repeated slightly off-register again and again--like a trapped echo--in successive squares. These aren’t conceptual; they’re haunting reminders of our fragile ecosystem. Concurrently, Joyce Neimanas shows high-heeled, petticoated, dancing, lounging, floating femmes collaged from bits of cutout newsprint and fashion ads. These are arranged with other feminine finery--fussy furniture, bird shapes, masked eyes--on vellum and then placed on sensitized photographic paper. Made without a camera, the collages are exposed to light from varied sources and the spectral results describe frolicky scenes with the feel of wild, girls-only sleepovers. Only in “Boss,” with its fine featured model clutching her house coat in stiff mannequin hands while gaping heads leer from below, do we sense the darker side to the feminine mystique. (Merging One, 1547 6th St., to March 18.)