Erika Rothenberg has an eye for dark humor. Her 10 recent pieces at the Zolla/Lieberman Gallery either find such humor in the American landscape or put it there. Results in each case are nicely pointed and not without-at times large-societal implications.

All the works have texts. But Rothenberg is an artist of few words. So favorite sources are signs, some presented as they are, others altered, still others invented. The humor comes in part from the public nature of the signs and how viewers see strangeness where the signmakers did not. One measure of Rothenberg's success is that the level of absurdity is high enough to at times make real and invented signs difficult to tell apart.

The most mordant pieces deal with death. The oldest one is a collection of quotations from literature and the news that give murderers' reasons for their crimes. A more recent work provides a cheery guest book and faux quill for viewers to enter the names of people they would do away with if annually allowed one free kill. Beyond the humor, these pieces startle, making nearly everything else on view, including a shower curtain with statistics and odds about 14 common causes of death, look comparitively gentle.

--Alan Artner, 2008