Jody Zellen
The Figure and The News
April 17 - May 16, 2026
Opening Friday, April 17
6 - 8 pm
The Figure and The News is an exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Jody Zellen. For this exhibition, Zellen will present short animations, lenticular images, digital prints and holo cubes displaying GIFs from two ongoing bodies of work. Words and images culled from the headline news have long been an inspiration, as well as the source for many of Zellen's projects. She is drawn to the poetic potential of news headlines and captions.
The ''news" is never static, yet reveals patterns over time while Zellen's anonymous figures move from place to place and exist within their own environments. While the "figure" implies embodiment and psychology, or lived experience the "news" points to mass media. This installation collides these modes— figuration shaped by headlines, and news content reworked through subjective, or emotional lenses. The exhibition examines what happens when fleeting information meets the enduring human form—what sticks, what distorts, what is forgotten. The combined works ask how the media frames humanity, and how anonymous silhouetted figures convey emotions and sign for us all.
ON VIEW
The Figure and The News: Zellen's figures are a combination of simple shapes — a circle, an oval and three rectangles. One will amble within the frame, changing colors, encountering other figures, moving through cityscapes, falling through holes, and morphing into multiple iterations of itself, only to disappear and then begin all over again. The figure, like the news, is presented as an infinite loop, utilizing many screens throughout the gallery.
Photo News is a body of work Zellen began in 2019 where she combines fragments from news photographs with excerpts from accompanying headlines. These digital collages are posted to Instagram each day @photonews5. She began this project on January 1, 2019 and has modified it for each new iteration. At the end of each year, the 365 stills are sequenced into an animation. Six years (2019-2024) have been composited into a single film that allows viewers to compare and contrast world events. Zellen will present both the combined version on a large screen, as well as individual years on individual monitors. In addition, a grid of stills from a single month will also be on display, as will be lenticular photographs created in 2017 using her News Wheel app.
Both bodies of work are activated by the location. As an entryway/gateway to public transit, the gallery site serves as a reminder of daily routines as well as daily and seasonal changes.
BIO
Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles based artist who works in many media simultaneously: animations, interactive installations, app art, net art, drawings, paintings, photographs, public art, and artists' books. She constantly thinks about ways to use new technologies and to integrate interactivity into her artworks.
Zellen received a BA from Wesleyan University (1983), a MFA from CalArts (1989) and a MPS from NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program (2009). Zellen was the recipient of a 2023 California Arts Council Established Artist Fellowship. She received project fellowships from the City of Santa Monica in 2021, 2016 and 2011, as well as a California Community Foundation Mid Career Fellowship (2012); a Center for Cultural Innovation Artistic Innovation Grant (2011); and a 2004 COLA (City of Los Angeles) Fellowship.
Her interactive installations have been on view at the Los Angeles International Airport (2019); Long Beach City College Art Gallery (2017); and at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, SC (2014). Her work has been included in more than 500 group exhibitions and festivals since the late 1980s and is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, The Getty Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The San Francisco Museum of Art, The Laguna Art Museum, The Orange County Museum of Art as well as in numerous private collections.
Artist website: jodyzellen.com