Time Warp:

In Jody Zellen’s engaging new work at Richard Heller Gallery, time is warped and text explodes. A 19th century painting salon is filled with post-conceptual language games; the altar of a Gothic cathedral receives the Word; and a gallery in the Hermitage Museum looks like MOCA during the recent John Cage show.

Zellen works with found photographs and prints of the traditional spaces of visual display (the church, the opera house, the salon), refashioning them so that every frame, archway or open space is evacuated to make room for bits and pieces of language. These fateful words, disembodied letters and indecipherable fragments of type register the contemporary moment, where information itself--incessant and unavoidable--is deafening.

Zellen’s work, more than ever, looks like the result of digital image processing. In fact, it is, as always, collaged of various photocopied fragments, which are layered, photographed and mechanically printed. There is something perverse in lingering over obsolete photochemical techniques in this era of electronic ubiquity.

And yet there is a certain logic as Zellen’s imagery converges on the antique and the anachronistic. Though the work may appear distant, it is actually quite nostalgic, whether by accident or design.

* Richard Heller Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave., B-5, Santa Monica, (310) 453-9191, through Saturday.