The works on paper that comprise Los Angeles-based artist Jody Zellen's latest exhibition, 'Of a Lost Utopia,' are poetic meditations on the fragmented way she reads, retains, and responds to the daily newspaper, using both old and new technologies.

This most recent project consists of her hand-drawn tracings from newspaper pages later scanned and digitally combined with digitized news photos. The exhibition presents original drawings, digital photographs, and an animated video in which the words and figures depicted in the drawings collide and overlap, adding yet another level of multivalent meaning to the work. Often the drawings include tracings where images and texts from both sides of the newspaper broadsheet are simultaneously exposed, revealing unintended relationships and commentary.

Using the machine-made and mass-produced newspaper as its source, the project begins as drawing, done by hand, and maintains that hand-rendered quality as the work undergoes subsequent digital transformations. Once the digital collages are completed, Zellen once again takes them apart layer by layer and incorporates the individual elements in a Flash-based animation, culminating in a DVD that becomes a highly distilled "portrait" of the News, a deconstruction of both medium and message.

Zellen takes a given, in this case the newspaper, and transforms it into something else. Beginning with the daily ritual of drawing, she ends up with a digital animation that both conveys a quality of tenderness embodied in the "touch" of the hand-drawn line and the sparseness of the imagery, while also critiquing mass media portrayal of global events. Zellen's images re-constitute the digested newspaper as a collection of fragments, depicting both beautiful and horrific events appearing poetically beautiful while maintaining a specific criticality.

Zellen works in many media simultaneously making photographs, installations, net art, public art, as well as artists' books that explore the subject of the urban environment. She employs media-generated representations of contemporary and historic cities as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations.

For more information visit www.jodyzellen.com or www.paulkopeikingallery.com