Jane Hammond at Galerie Lelong

In Jane Hammond's work, meaning is built up from strings of associations, often using and reusing a set 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.

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

Less dizzyingly eclectic are a set of photographs dated 200405 whose titles promise autobiographical content. In fact, they are collages of found 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 some kind of native ceremony. In October First (Mom's Birthday) a picture-perfect postwar family tumbles excitedly down their staircase, oblivious to a pornographic vignette tucked into the lower corner of the photo.

However, the heart of this show belongs to a set of works that touch on 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 sky, Antarctica and Europe. Mounted over these are digital-print cutouts of remarkably diverse species of butterflies. They spread out across the maps, sometimes clustering, sometimes appearing to head out to the unknown beyond the maps' edges. The lifelike insects are beautiful and poignant, suggesting flight and freedom from borders and petty nationalisms on one hand, and on 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 over a low platform in the center of a separate room.

Actually, these remarkably real-looking leaves are artful reproductions of ones gathered by the artist and her friends. As viewers learned by reading a wall text and looking closely at the installation, Hammond inscribed each of the roughly 1,500 leaves with the name of an American soldier killed in Iraq. (As the war goes on, 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 less puzzlelike than many of the other works here, Fallen speaks directly from the heart.

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