Systems: Betty Cunningham Gallery, New York

Systems propose sets of interconnected things, organized in accordance with logical orders designed to promote coherent knowledge both of the whole and of parts. Yet however much we may depend on our carefully plotted systems to guide us in our cognitive structuring of the world, the systemization of knowledge is never an innocent enterprise, as the forms those systems take always also work to produce meaning in complex – and frequently unpredictable and unruly – ways. The art of Abby Leigh pursues underlying philosophical problems of representational systems and their formal structures with gentle yet relentless force. Taking as her conceptual springboard subjects as vast and varied as geography, the history of medicine, and the natural sciences, Leigh’s art launches questions into realms no less profound than the nature of human knowledge and the construction of meaning through systems of symbolic form.