The word made image - collaboration of John Ashbery and painter Jane Hammond

All Hammond's previous paintings employed square or rectangular supports, but the works that grew from the Ashbery titles often took other forms. Sore Models, for example, the first title she worked with, became a pair of foot-shaped canvases. She returned to this title three times, employing a shaped diptych format for hands as well as feet. She next created The Hagiography of This Moment. According to Hammond, as she thought about this title, a frontal, bilaterally symmetrical composition sprang "full grown" from her head. Again, the result is a shaped canvas, this time a shield that slopes to a center point at the bottom and is topped by three gables, each with a painted oculus. The form alludes to both a church and an altarpiece.

Like many of her paintings, The Hagiography of This Moment is full of jocular allusions. Dominating the canvas is a central praying figure with red wings who bears Hammond's own visage. She stands upon a cloud which is in fact the smoke from a fire directly below. The figure, upon a mottled metallic field of gold leaf over a nubby ground, is flanked by two incongruous cheery morning-glory vines and a text in an ecclesiastical typeface in which the artist makes a deadpan confession of how she once netted the neighbor's goldfish and fried them in butter.

Surrounded by Buddies, one of several Ashbery titles implying aggregates of elements, has a more conventional square format. Hammond depicts an earnest aroma researcher, eyes closed and nose pressed to an apparatus from which tubes snake to two jittery stacks of glass boxes. Most of these boxes encapsulate vignettes from the x-rated reaches of Hammond's image bank--scenes of bestiality, group gropes and other varieties of sexual pleasuring. In this company, a scene of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation seems erotic. Although reproduced in the catalogue, Surrounded by Buddies was not hung in the New York show.

Beginning with Pumpkin Soup #1, Hammond prepared the canvas for all works in the series by laminating onto it layers of paper. She came to regard a layered paper field as conceptually and physically appropriate for realizing the poet's titles. In the last few years, Hammond has experimented with paper processes in an ongoing series of collages which involve solvent transfers, lino block prints and rubber-stamped images.

These techniques are used to strong effect in Sea of Troubles, a title Ashbery lifted from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy. A framing device of twinned pages, like an open book, does not fully contain the theatrical assembly of images, some of which violate the internal boundaries. Spatial complexity is compounded by actual and implied layering of elements. For example, slightly overlapping a vignette of a pair of hands hanging a curtain is a trompe l'oeil rend of the canvas. In keeping with the Shakespearean source of the title, Hammond evokes ghostly appearances by submerging images in the underlayer of paper. These include vintage illustrations of a girl's life-saving lessons. That and an overpainted aquarium make water references that allude to the title and have autobiographical significance for the artist. A skeleton, standing in the aquarium, is prominent on the left-hand "page." The skeleton confronts the grim alternative inherent in "to be or not to be."