Thumbing through one of Damon Zucconi’s altered books is similar to reading in a foreign language you once knew well, but can now only fumble through. Zucconi wrote a computer program to regurgitate pre-existing texts, only with each word very slightly misspelled. At first you can follow along, seamlessly interpreting the text word by word, line by line, but when you reach the end of the page you realize that you have no idea what’s going on. It’s a strange dissonance that makes you doubt ever having had a grasp on the language in the first place. Other works in “Red Roses for a Blue Lady,” Zucconi’s second show at the gallery, also use code to cannily intervene in perception and interpretation. Several prints are sourced from color photos of roses. From a distance they appear grayscale, but up close, thanks to a complex coding process that Zucconi devised to break up the blooms’ hue, they become pixelated with tiny checkerboards of bright color. —Leigh Anne Miller
Pictured: Damon Zucconi: Rosa ‘Fortuna’, 2016, inkjet print, frame painted Munsell N8 Gray. 10â?? by 15¾ inches. Courtesy JTT, New York.