Artist Jennifer Bolande joins us to premiere The Composition of Decomposition (2018), a film composed of New York Times fragments from 2013 to 2015 that she excised from the center of stacked newspapers and paired for the camera in their original sequence. Recalling both photomontage and newsfeed (in the strictest sense), the work’s subtle yet profound impact derives from repeated chance encounters between texts and image that prove, at turns, jarring, beguiling, and banal. Fueled by the artist’s interest in “the process of information becoming news, and news becoming history,” The Composition of Decomposition’s illumination of junctures in visual and material culture taps into the lineage of the Pictures Generation artists, among whom Bolande came of age in New York. In our current moment, when physical newspapers are fading from ubiquity to artifact, the process of reading, interpreting, and perceiving meaning through context pivots from emotional to technological verbiage—the act of processing. Displaying the artist’s propensity to infuse everyday objects and situations with lyrical rigor, the short Visible Distance (2019)—which opens this evening’s program—features Southern California billboards that broadcast a series of mountain landscapes onto the very locations pictured.