SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- For nearly two decades, New York artist Jane Hammond has been using a fixed lexicon of 276 images to create paintings and works on paper, both flat and three-dimensional, that layer prints, photocopies, and photographs with collage and handwork. Her visual vocabulary borrows from carnival costume and puppetry, instructional manuals, board games, scrapbooks, maps, and more. Jane Hammond: Paper Work, on view at the de Young Museum through August 31, 2008, presents nearly 30 large-scale works on paper, many of which are unique and culled from private collections.

Hammond’s visual vocabulary of 276 images allows her to explore context and meaning while creating complex combinations of images that enhance the sculptural quality of the work. The range of Hammond’s work in the exhibition includes All Souls (Hefei), one of her exquisite trompe l’oeil butterfly map series; Scrapbook, a large, three-dimensional open book featuring silhouettes, paper doll-like figures, paper flowers, fortunes, feathers, and paper matchbooks; and The Wonderfulness of Downtown, an editioned print combining a map of lower Manhattan, the artist’s home, with a number of photographic images from her neighborhood. “My intention was to use the lexicon of the 276 images in ‘recombinant’ fashion––think DNA––and let myself make any kind of work of art I wanted with them,” says Hammond.

Jane Hammond (b. 1950) graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1972 and earned an MFA from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1977. Her first solo exhibition was in 1987 in New York, and since then she has been exhibiting her work nationally and internationally. Works of art by Hammond have been acquired by more than 70 museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.