Art Review

Displacements: Though the images in Jody Zellen’s “Invisible Cities Series,” now at Jan Kesner Gallery, are described as large-format color photographs, they are nearly colorless--which is part of the point. Computer-generated montages of image and text, printed in a range of browns and grays, they are not only colorless, but texture-less and sexless too--disembodied traces of our digital age.

Zellen’s interweavings of text (her own) and blurred, grainy photographs of architecture, train platforms and city streets have a distilled, declaratory tone related to work by Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer, but its roots run deeper, back to the early decades of this century, when mass media in their first incarnations began to flood the consciousness of city dwellers. Numerous European artists at the time gravitated toward collage and photomontage as a means of engaging with the new visual cacophony of modernity.

Zellen’s work lacks the tactile thrill of its antecedents, but the layering does lend it a certain calculated lushness. Through fragmenting her images and text, staging disjunctions and sometimes crowding lines upon one another so densely that they cancel one another out into illegibility, Zellen conjures the very sense of displacement and elusiveness that she ascribes to life in the metropolis. She recognizes the soul-denying emptiness of urban life and laments it, but not as convincingly as she simulates, appropriates and exploits it.

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* Jan Kesner Gallery, 164 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 938-6834, through May 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.