Jody Zellen, "Trigger" / Pace Digital University Gallery
Cecilia Muhlstein
Jody Zellen’s most recent site-specific interactive installation, "Trigger," at Pace Digital University Gallery in New York City, utilizes found images from newspapers and other texts that are transmitted through seven projectors onto the surrounding walls. The location of the project, a three-floor stairwell, visually replicates various images of a "city." Even the windows are covered with large transparencies of urban images.
Individuals navigating the stairs inadvertently trigger sensors, located at various points, activating the projectors to emit random images of the city such as pedestrians, subways and cars. Each image subtlety morphs into another image, an effect that produces a brutal intimacy and tension. Each wall, filled with images, is in constant movement.
The title of her project, "Trigger," connotes various complicated images, particularly after September 11 and the ever-increasing security measures for New York City. For Zellen, the title is relevant to urban spaces like New York because we are continuously triggering sensors as we interact with the motions of daily life.
This triggering is visualized through variant shadows and long panoramic views of buildings and blurred figures canvassing down streets or in cavernous spaces that fill the walls. In one image, on what appears to be a long bridge, a figure in the background has his back turned into a corner of a wall, while in the foreground another figure stands with the body turned into the same wall. Slowly the fore figure disappears and the viewer is left alone with this lone stranger on the screen.
This sense of movement and flux is not New York specific, it relates to the movement of all metropolitan cities and produces the filmic aspect of what Zellen describes as her desire for a "generic" city. This type of metropolis reminded me of the bleak and beautiful urban landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte where Jeanne Moreau goes on long walks by herself. The beautifully emptied streets reveal memories of her past and the present; a city where bottle rockets appear seemingly out of nowhere and abandoned buildings inhabit the urban landscape. Zellen’s work as well infuses this sense of alienation in an increasingly chaotic world, yet she is able to locate the individual, like Moreau’s character, as capable of determining meaning once you are able to reflect.
When I asked her about the sense of alienation that metropolitan cities often incur, we spoke about the difference between Los Angeles, where Zellen resides, and New York City. For Zellen, she feels more alienation in Los Angeles, "a large spread-out suburbia," rather than the more fiercely physical space of a city like New York where "people interact constantly." In New York there is a connection to people in general. Whether you interact or not with individuals, you are at least not isolated by large tracts of land and freeways. Part of the goal of the project was to create a space where anyone can bring their own unique memory and experience of any city as they interact with the installation. And, in effect, her project’s success is how it represents the sensual components of the metropolitan experience as a way of identification, not alienation, from the urban center; it moves the viewer into a meditative state.
Jody Zellen’s significant range includes ongoing web-based projects like the remarkable, "Ghost City" (www.ghostcity.com), and the newer Holland-based project, "Tomorrow’s News Today" (www.volsskrant.com/oog). She also does photography, public art and artist books. In all her work there is a poetic sense of temporality. "Ghost City" and "Disembodied Voices" (www.disembodiedvoices.com) include moments of immense fragility and mourning. As a viewer, I choose each image and I am given a sense of agency, the illusion of agency, while simultaneously, in "Trigger," I am able to also participate within her work, but beyond the computer screen. Zellen is an artist whose work poses questions and asks the viewer to take an active role in the multitude of possible answers.
