The Figure and The News is an exhibition by Jody Zellen featuring pieces from two ongoing bodies of work: All too Human and Photo News. On view is a video wall with twelve small monitors each showing a different set of short animations, lenticular images, digital prints and one-inch HolaCubes displaying animated GIFs.

In the body of work she calls All too Human, Zellen explores the animated movements of silhouetted figures — a combination of simple shapes — a circle, an oval and three rectangles. The silhouettes amble within the frame, changing colors, encountering other figures, moving through cityscapes, falling through holes, and morphing into multiple iterations, only to disappear and begin all over again, caught in an infinite loop.


Sample animations for more click here.

Words and images culled from newspapers are the inspiration, as well as the source for many of her projects. She is drawn to the poetic potential of headlines and captions, and for many years has created works that juxtapose news photographs and the words associated with them. Photo News is a body of work begun in 2019 where fragments of news photographs are collaged with excerpts from their accompanying headlines. These digital images are posted to Instagram each day: @photonews5. Since January 1, 2019, Zellen has modified her collages every year to create a new iteration. At the end of each year, the 365 stills are sequenced into an animation. Six years (2019-2024) have been composited to allow viewers to compare and contrast these selected images and textual records of world events. In addition, a printed grid of stills from August 2025 are on display, as well as eight lenticular photographs created in 2017 using her iOS app News Wheel.


Photo News Animation composite (2019-2024) to see full animation for more click here.
To view on instagram go to @photonews5.

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 simplified 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 silhouettes convey emotions and sign for us all.
Instagram images for August 2025. Visit Instagram here.


Lenticilar images 14 x 11 inches each. Suite of 6. View as GIF animations here.

INSTALLATION VIEWS