Dina Dalya Dar; Artist Known for Her Pioneering Xerography

Dina Dalya Dar, an artist known for her pioneering work in xerography involving creation of images on color copying machines, has died. She was 56.

Ms. Dar died Thursday in Tarzana of leukemia.

Trained as a painter, she began experimenting with early model copy machines in the early 1970s and found her medium. Sometimes called electrography, her art form involved assembling collages of images of objects ranging from a child’s vest to the lifeline from her own palm.

Thinking of her work as cinematography more than printmaking or photography, Ms. Dar used the collages to tell a story, achieving what Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic called “images of astonishing fragility and personal insight.”

One of the artist’s most noted exhibitions was “A Loop of Fate: Dina Dar’s Odyssey to Jewish Portugal” at Hebrew Union College’s Skirball Museum in 1992.

In that exhibit, the Polish-born Ms. Dar told the story of Jews in the Portuguese city of Belmonte who had been forcibly converted to Christianity in the late 15th Century.

“This is more profound than a story about Judaism in Portugal,” she told The Times at the time of the exhibition. “It’s a search for identity--not just roots in the soil, but roots in the spirit--and that’s universal.”

Among her other exhibitions throughout the United States and in Brazil, Europe, South Korea and Israel were “Family Shrines,” a memorial to a lifestyle lost in the Holocaust; “Between Holy and Profane,” an autobiographical story, and “Fleurs Bleus,” an exploration of light and flowers.

Ms. Dar studied art at Avni Institute in Israel, Cal State Northridge, Art Center College of Design, Otis Art Institute and Chouinard Art School.

She is survived by her husband, Reuven Dar; her children, Nily and Jonathan; her mother, Rosa Wiesenfeld, and a brother, Arnon Wiesenfeld.