Self-imposed restrictions play a major role in Jane Hammond’s art. In the past she has limited herself to two standard sizes of canvas and titled her paintings only by strings of numbers determined by her compositions; since 1988 she has constructed crowded surrealist stories using a fixed repertoire of 276 symbols and images borrowed from books, games, paintings, scientific charts, and various other sources. In 1993 Hammond initiated another kind of process: She asked poet John Ashbery to write down some titles for paintings that she would then execute. He came up with forty-four, and she has