Photo Genesis

Nostalgia has a field day this time of year, the season of family gatherings and personal reflection. It’s fitting, then, that Nicolas Fedak II’s nostalgia-suffused installation work, “Dust From the Stars,” is in the Brand Library’s Skylight Gallery.

But it’s hardly as straight-faced or ingenuous as first impressions suggest.

Are these fragmented old family photographs as wistful as they seem? Or is the show as much about a deep-rooted longing for wistfulness and rootedness in an age of psychic dislodging?

The back quarter of the ample gallery is devoted to a site-specific installation covered with dead leaves and yellowed newspaper, on which the visitor is invited to tromp.

Props are scattered about--a bird cage with a time-measuring metronome, a music stand, a stereopticon and an old ironing board, things that instinctively put us in mind of the last turn of the century.

A sheet of lace curtain is suspended from the ceiling. It’s a simple, effective work touching on emotional time travel, or at least the stubborn desire for it.

Imagery renewed: Artfully abused imagery is the medium and the message for Marianne Magne, whose show “‘The Body Palimpsest,” hangs in the Brand’s Atrium Gallery. Photography is the basis of Magne’s work, but her post-image manipulation is integral to the end result.

Magne has scratched, painted over, added filters and overlays to original pictures, often of female nudes, that take on new potential meanings through the artist’s handiwork.

Sometimes, the viewer’s response is triggered more by the power of suggestion than by explicit references: “As red as I can see,” for example, implies violence through its blood-red scrim, but the source image is innocent enough.

“Bleu cathodic #1” depicts pained faces distorted in a way that reminds us of painter Francis Bacon’s twisted figurative touch. In Magne’s work, beauty is submerged, sullied and rerouted through various processes.

BE THERE

“The Body Palimpsest” and “Dust From the Stars,” through Saturday at Brand Library Art Galleries, 1601 W. Mountain St., Glendale. Hours: 1-5 p.m. today and Saturday. (818) 548-2051.