CLEVELAND, OHIO.- The Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art presents "Jane Hammond: The John Ashbery Collaboration, 1993-2001. In 1993, painter Jane Hammond commissioned Ashbery to create a set of unique titles that would act as catalysts for a new series of paintings. Forty-four whimsical titles that range from Pumpkin Soup and Mad Elga to Love You in the Morning and Good Night Nurse. The relationships between titles and the resulting paintings are at once obscure and evident, yet all rooted in the lively intersection of language and image. A bibliophile at heart, Hammond creates all of her paintings using a controlled pool of 276 images drawn from such texts as 19th century technical materials, antique children's books, manuals on magic tricks, botanical guides and pornographic comics. Essentially, Hammond has created her own alphabet with which to speak her own language in painting. A very postmodern approach, initially, but this alphabet frees Hammond's imagination to an almost surrealist state of creativity. In this age of information and sensory overload, "think of Hammond as having down-loaded those 276 images into a database," notes essayist Ingrid Schaffner, "and suddenly her painting system becomes a program to process an ever-expanding web of information."