Photographer Vivian Joyner debuts a gingerly edited body of portraits of her mother in My Mother, Not Myself: Portraits of Amy Joyner, at Cal Arts L Shaped Gallery in Los Angeles. Despite their clarity, her photographs have a painterly quality to them: One mostly red, one white, blue, black, and green, each tells a color story that rivals the interpersonal relationship depicted. The photographs are set within a mother-daughter getaway to the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia, a family favorite. Its grounds and rooms are lush. Joyner has an obvious preoccupation with the throw-back opulence of the hotel interior, but the main focus is her mother.

Joyner’s mother fits the conventions of society lady, philanthropist and general woman-of-influence as, in one photograph, she stands poised in cobalt wool skirt suit in a matchy-matchy room of upholstery and curtains. As the center of the exhibition, this is Mrs. Joyner as she is known. She makes an effort to let down her guard for her daughter as the shoot continues: stocking-toed and approachable on plush carpeting; in a white hotel bathrobe sandwiched between shower and vanity; clutching her fur as the car door is opened, her ring turning to the side as if too large. Her daughter is working to dissolve her façade (for Mrs. Joyner, this goes as far as face-made and hair-coiffed). But regardless of put-on and polish, Vivian triumphs in peeling away the persona of an individual she may or may not identify with.