Figure This: Jody Zellen's Inventive Art at CMAY Gallery Los Angeles
Jody Zellen’s new show at CMAY Gallery in Los Angeles, Figuratively Speaking, affirms and expands the possibilities of using technology as a tool to create art in ways that are engaging and pleasing.
The exhibition, which is on view until July 11, features Zellen’s work in a variety of mediums, including lenticular images, animations on screens, a sculpture of printed sheets of images on a spindle, as well as a new series of animations contained in small holographic cubes.
Zellen creates anthropomorphic figures from simplified mathematical shapes, such as a circle, a rectangle, an oval. It is like Zellen is creating a universal language. At the same time, there is a consistency to the forms, shapes and patterns in Zellen’s work that are distinctive and all her own.
In the lenticular works in particular, the changing color grids reminded me of the work of Beatriz Milhazes, as well as the work of the late Yacov Agam, both of whom created harmonious color combinations that are different when looked at from different vantage points. As Zellen’s works change as we look at them, the changing colors harmonize, in a way that might have pleased Josef Albers.
At other times, such as in her lenticular work Up Down, the human forms are so abstracted and elongated to resemble a pencil as much as a person, and there is a playfulness to this. In other works such as the animated All Too Human 3, the form is like a wanderer staring out a window at nature.
There is a mathematic discipline in how the triangles and shapes repeat and change. The shifting images whether on a loop, as a GIF, or in the lenticular images, may well be meant to evoke the distractions of contemporary life where our screens flicker with a flood of images, or even our consciousness which takes abstract forms and sees the human in them and that, in Zellen’s work, can convey emotion and even, at times, humor.
There is plenty of talk these days of using Large Language Models to create art, particularly with the opening of Rafic Anadol’s Dataland, but with Figuratively Speaking, Zellen’s shows that Art born of other technologies, including animation loops, GIFS, and even small holo- boxes can remain small, personal, and yet seem new and universal.