The art of getting carried away

It started with a recurring dream.

French photographer Maia Flore was weightless, gliding through the air that separated sleep from reality.

A news and fashion photographer by day, Flore, 26, spends her waking hours creating photo spreads for the likes of Louis Vuitton and Paris newspaper Le Monde. While those assignments may have a whimsical quality, they are nevertheless tethered to reality. Her art work, however, is a different matter.

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Flore's photo series, Sleep Elevations, plumbs her drifting subconscious in a dozen surreal, ethereal self-portraits created from 2010 to 2013.

Each photo collage seamlessly integrates an image of the sleeping photographer into a misty or sun-bleached landscape, with a host of unlikely objects threatening to lift her out of the frame. Flore certainly isn't the only photographer to have imagined herself floating, Danny Deckchair-style, under a handful of party balloons, but it's hard to imagine that anyone else has considered the buoyant possibilities of, say, a pinwheel or a schooner — or, for that matter, their use as metaphors for a freewheeling childhood.

"When you are a child, you collect a lot of things and don't have to explain why, you just like it," Flore says of her chosen imagery. "I like to keep childish things alive."

A dandelion, for example, lifts a grown-up Flore into the air in one collage, because as a little girl she couldn't resist blowing the seeds from the stalk and watching them flutter away.

Flore traveled to France, Germany, Sweden, Iceland, and the United States in her search for places that could enhance the images' dreamlike quality. Whether pristine beaches, snowy hills, or urban rooftops, the landscapes the photographer floats over seem as boundless as her own imagination.

California, in particular, made a lasting impression on her. Thanks to a five-month residency at Berkeley's Kala Art Institute, Flore says she has a new, kaleidoscope-like perspective on her art. "It was my very first time in the U.S.," she says. "My work was new for (her fellow artists), and their point of view was new for me."

Flore has since returned to France, where she completed a series of surrealist photos of her country's landmarks for France's tourism agency. But true to form, the photographer, who bridges dreams and reality, feels compelled to drift between countries as well.

"I think I need both points of view now," she says. "It is easier when you are not at home to have a fresh start."

**Sleep Elevations appears at Modernbook Gallery in San Francisco through June 28**