On display at the LZ Project Space, a part of the New York Studio Gallery, are forty-three images of faces by Zev Jonas. Rather, these are images of images of idealized faces showing the passage of time. A mix of color and black & white, they range in size from 4x6 to 12x18 inches, all exhibited as digital pigment prints from scans of the original film.

The faces appear to be closely cropped excerpts and abstractions from posters, billboards, mannequins, porcelain headstone portraits - which show the passage of time through various agencies (dirty raindrops, cracks in the mannequin, light, shadow, framing.)

Placement of individual images is key to the effectiveness of this kind of group presentation and I found myself following the interplay of gazes in the individual faces. While some individual images grabbed my interest (the shadow of razor wire by the face in #29), many other images worked best within the context of their groupings (e.g., the gaze between #2, #5 & #6 and #7 & #9). As with any such exercise, some of the groupings work better than others.

However, the image that sticks out in my mind is the one solo image in the exhibit: light plays across the surface of the original image photographed creating a softening effect while a V-shaped shadow isolates a face that looks up somewhat ambiguously, whether in hope or anticipation I am not sure.

Zev Jonas offers no titles for the individual works, nor does he offer clues as to where or when the photos were taken. Rather, he has grouped all but one of the images into twelve sets of two to five images arranged floating on the wall, the images in each group providing the only context for each other (and, furthermore, they can only be acquired as individual groups, not as individual prints).