WORDS connects Jenny Holzer’s longstanding interest in the realities of living and survival with the political prospects and technological anxieties of the moment. Drawings, paintings, condoms, electronics, and stone are woven into a conversation spanning the artist’s entire output to date, whose subject matter ranges from desolation to deliverance, from the mundane to the absurd. Placed side by side with the language of chatbots and intelligence reports, texts written by Holzer decades ago can be read as prescient commentary on current events.

Holzer began creating paintings based on government documents in 2005 as a way of sharing information on the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and she has expanded the practice to encompass the impeachment inquiries into Donald Trump and research on the military applications of artificial intelligence.

The process of creating these paintings begins with tracing their source documents onto vellum. Holzer has recently begun to transform these tracings into artworks in their own right – shown here for the first time – through the addition of gestural marks in graphite and charcoal. Some of these markings form abstract patterns, while others reinforce the redactions in the original pages, as if to underscore the gaps in our knowledge. Still others evidence the hands that made them: There are fingerprints all over these documents.

Several benches that did exist now lie smashed at the front of the gallery, in a scene of deliberate destruction emblematic of “what one sees on the news,” in the artist’s words. Two LED signs atop the rubble are custom-programmed with contrasting sets of AI-generated text: a “bad” program of incendiary statements in the style of the far right (some produced by the “traditional American” chatbot GIPPR AI), and a “good” program describing transcendent experiences of joy, love, and beauty. Holzer’s work has always operated between these two poles, leavening darkness with kindness and reminding us that ALL THINGS ARE DELICATELY INTERCONNECTED.

Holzer’s experiments with artificial intelligence arise from the same spirit of inquiry that has guided her many other investigations into the nefarious and the sublime, the same desire to play and be of public service that led her to fill the gallery’s window on the street below with thousands of condoms. Here, ultimately, is the fundamental conviction that a democracy can only function if its citizens understand the forces that hold the potential to transform their lives.