Sixteen:One Gallery is pleased to present new works by James Hough and Jody Zellen, running March 22nd though April 25th, 2008. An opening reception for the artists will be held March 22nd, from 7-10 pm. Hough’s paintings at first glance bring a sense of familiarity, but when closely viewed are found to be a fictional interpretation of society. While Zellon’s tracings offer an initial sense of abstraction, upon closer examination are found to be manipulations newsprints. Both artists take freedom with adaptation and manipulation of popular images, omitting and including at free will.

James Hough’s mixed-media landscapes, made with layers of sprayed and brushed acrylic, water-soluble oil pastels, and oil paint, depict a world in which nature creeps back into civilization, and the remaining billboards, road signs, and kiosks offer glimpses of the society that produced them. The highly rendered paintings juggle the friction between the landscape--sometimes pristine, sometimes cultivated--and the signage--flat, graphic, communicative. In addition, some of the paintings are straightforward signs, inspired by public service posters as seen in elementary classrooms. These latter pieces, as well as one small, kiosk-like sculpture, are like little windows that show us some of the values of the culture that would have produced them, the same culture that would have produced the signage in the landscapes.
In 2005 during a residency at Kaus Australis in Rotterdam, Jody Zellen decided to concentrate on something she had done for many years--doodle. She started a daily meditation of drawing each morning that continues to this day. These drawings are filled with flowers and patterns, buildings and figures. Sometimes they include tracings. Other times they are just random lines. They grow organically, filling the page. Eventually, this practice began to affect another daily ritual, reading the newspaper each morning. Reading the paper became a practice of studying the images, isolating bits of text in ads, assessing how things work together on a page, and seeing how all the elements of the newspaper come together. With this in mind she began tracing bits of the paper, using the sun against the window as a light box, creating trace drawings that allowed the random juxtaposition of what appears on the front and back side of the page to dictate the image.
Eventually these drawings migrated into the compute where they took on a different character. Combining drawings, and scans of the newspaper itself, Zellen created digital collages that strike a balance between the hand made and the mechanically reproduced. Using the program Flash, she also began to bring the collages to life, literally animating them. In the animations, the drawn elements appear and disappear, fading in and out, getting larger or smaller as they meander across the screen in a continuous loop. Eventually the media content evolved out of the animations, leaving just the black pen lines outlining anonymous figures who populating an ever-changing landscape.