“In My Own Time” at the Light Factory.

Significantly, the Light Factory (a Knight Arts grantee) is continually showcasing and supporting artists and photographers right here in the Queen City. In fact, the Light Factory has a whole series devoted to this purpose — “In Our Own Backyard.” The current show in the Middleton McMillan Gallery, “In My Own Time: Photographs by Amy Herman and Lauren Doran,” features works by two Charlotte artists. Running through January 28, 2013, “In My Own Time” examines an ever persistent theme of female identity and family.

Lauren Doran’s work in “In My Own Time” at the Light Factory.

In this show, both artists use photography to examine self. In a diary like exploration, Herman and Doran delve into the intimate relationships in their lives that shape their own identities. Photography serves to mirror and magnify these identities. Particularly, for Amy Herman whose tableaux-like self portraits dramatize everyday scenes and her most fundamental relationship as a daughter. In her own words “I translate banal scenes experienced in my everyday life into dramatic tableaux that place an exaggerated importance on the repetition of our most familiar surroundings.”

Doran’s approach in some ways is more subtle and dreamlike with a hazy green light suffusing the images. Doran takes as her theme “the ever changing emotional and psychological landscape of a marriage.” Here time and change over time gain significance as the viewer sees the marriage move through different seasons with different qualities. The partners in the marriage not only change in their relationship to each other, but as their lives change new identities emerge.

Image by Amy Herman in “In My Own Time.”

“Misfit” by Lauren Doran.

The Light Factory: 345 North College St., Charlotte; 704-333-9755; www.lightfactory.org. Gallery hours: Mon.-Sat., 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sun., 1-6 p.m.