In Jane Hammond's work.

In Jane Hammond's work, meaning is built up from strings of associations, oftentimes using and reusing a establish of quasi-pictographic images. For this exhibition, Hammond, who is best known for her paintings, dramatically expanded her range of mediums to include photography and installation.

any works are compendiums. A Taxonomy of Hands (2004-05) is compos of 66 matchbox-size containers that shelter miniature hands from different kinds of dolls--a catcher's mitt, a doll hand, a Mickey Mouse glove etc Other works near new arrangements of the set up images that constitute Hammond's lexicon. pair works on Mylar use reproductions of traditional Japanese landscape flourishs as their backdrop. Painted, collaged and traced above these are diverse images that include traditional geisha representations, a polar bear, a hula dancer, an 18th-century stilt walker and an acrobat balanced onward the back of a horse.

Les dizzyingly eclectic are a station of photographs dated 200405 whose titles promise autobiographical easy in mind In fact, they are collages of ground vintage photographs pieced together in Photoshop and printed to create seamless absurdist narratives. For instance, Mahdia (Tunisian Men Honor my Mother and Her Poppies) introduces a 1950s-era American woman into an ethnographic documentation of a certain number of kind of native ceremony. In October First (Mom's Birthday) a picture-perfect postwar family falls excitedly down their staircase, oblivious to a pornographic vignette pulled into the lower corner of the photo.

However, the heart of this display belongs to a set of works that touch in succession the larger tragedies and geopolitical disruptions of our day. Four works, with the series title "All Souls" consist of thickly built up parchments of handmade paper imprinted with sections of maps of the Middle East, the firmament Antarctica and Europe. Mounted above these are digital-print cutouts of remarkably diverse species of butterflies. They spread on the outside across the maps, sometimes clustering, sometimes appearing to head without to the unknown beyond the maps' cutting sides The lifelike insects are beautiful and poignant, suggesting flight and freedom from borders and frivolous nationalisms on one hand, and in succession the other recalling the pinned and desiccated specimens of the butterfly collector.

In the show's largest work, Fallen (2004-05) the butterflies morph into a pile of large, brilliantly colored autumn leaves spread through a low platform in the center of a separate room

Actually, these remarkably real-looking leaves are artful reproductions of singles gathered by the artist and her friends. As viewers learned through reading a wall text and looking closely at the installation, Hammond inscribed each of the roughly 1500 leaves with the name of an American soldier killed in Iraq. (As the war goe onward she will continue to add leaves as more soldiers die.) Thus, what first appears to be a celebration of nature's beauty becomes a reminder of the mounting toll of war. Simpler and les puzzlelike than many of the other works here, Fallen speaks directly from the heart.

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