Seasonal Overlay,

2007

Zeller’s mesmerizing drawings appropriate and recontextualize imagery derived from a wide variety of sources, including maps, satellite photographs, electron micrographs, and anatomical diagrams, all of them "two dimensional translations of the three dimensional world." The results are strange invented worlds like the one in Seasonal Overlay, which represents a space that seems at once close and far away. Zeller has compared the thin layer of life on the surface of the earth to human skin, both of them characterized by fragility and porosity. Such an analogy is very much at play in Seasonal Overlay, where Zeller’s obsessive, repetitive marks evoke the texture of both flesh and dirt. These marks are interrupted by circles and lines—areas delineated by the absence, not presence, of marks. Such voids read as sutures or, alternately, as topographical elements like streams and valleys.