Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles–based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans animation, interactive installation, app art, net art, drawing, painting, photography, public art, and artists’ books. For decades, Zellen has explored the evolving relationship between technology, communication, and human experience, consistently positioning herself at the intersection of digital experimentation and traditional studio practice. While deeply engaged with emerging technologies and interactive systems, she remains equally committed to making works by hand, combining the immediacy of drawing and painting with the fluid possibilities of digital media.

Her exhibition at CMAY Gallery, Figuratively Speaking, presents works from her ongoing series All Too Human, an expansive body of work centered on the expressive potential of simplified animated figures. The exhibition includes small monitors displaying looping animations, lenticular images, one-inch HolaCubes presenting animated GIFs, and an interactive sculpture that invites viewer engagement. Together, these works create an immersive environment in which movement, repetition, and transformation become vehicles for emotional and psychological reflection.

The exhibition’s title, Figuratively Speaking, suggests a movement beyond literal representation toward metaphor, symbolism, and poetic interpretation. Zellen’s silhouetted figures, constructed from the simplest of geometric elements: a circle, an oval, and three rectangles, become stand-ins for universal human experiences. Reduced to their most basic forms, the figures nevertheless convey surprising emotional complexity. They wander through fragmented cityscapes, encounter one another, split apart, change color, fall through openings, multiply, dissolve, and endlessly regenerate. Suspended within perpetual cycles of movement and transformation, these figures evoke the rhythms and anxieties of contemporary life while simultaneously suggesting humor, resilience, vulnerability, and perseverance.