Lum scanned her chosen fragment of lorem ipsum, setting its font in the ubiquitous Helvetica—something of a cliché, graphic-design-geek artist Lum is first to admit, but a visually clear and effective one for her purposes. Into that textual body, she digitally massaged a handful of English words that attentive viewers can discover, and may well find significant. After printing the resulting collage, Lum, whom a friend once dubbed “queen of the X-Acto knife,” cut the printed text into long, narrow vertical strips, then shifted their register to further fragment the lettering and endow the whole with a constructivist look. 

After scanning that final collage, the artist deployed a digital projector to transcribe her files in pencil onto sheetrock walls, the largest of which measures almost twelve by thirty feet. With the help of one assistant, Lum painted the outlined fragmented text by hand, using brushes no broader than one inch. Together, artist and assistant layered multiple coats of black or white Benjamin Moore, water-based exterior latex paint to fill letters roughly twelve inches tall—large enough to enable viewers to notice individual brushstrokes and imperfectly rendered edges. All of which is to say that, despite its use of some digital methods, Assembly (Lorem Ipsum) is a resolutely analogue work. 

The mural’s longest wall coheres as fields of bold black lettering against a white ground. On an adjacent wall, three panels of similarly stuttering text—this time, white letters against black—reverse that scheme. The bike tunnel also includes a shallow mezzanine level, where a broad recessed panel shimmers with slimmer black letters against white to yield a luminously dense filigree of signs.  

When I visited the Wilson Building on opening day, it was especially tempting to linger in the bike tunnel. Not only was Lum’s mural visually and intellectually engaging, its situation provided a welcome zone of calm and quiet in contrast to the amplified music resounding throughout the neighboring courtyard. The longer I stayed with Assembly, the more I enjoyed looking for and finding some of the words that Lum embedded within lorem ipsum’s larger chopped-word salad. They have lost none of their integrity as secreted, wall-bound transmitters of relevant activities, qualities, rights: “READING,” “MOCA,” “RESIST,” “PEOPLE,” “POWER,” “TRUTH,” “ASSEMBLY,” “FREEDOM.” With their emphasis on First Amendment guarantees of assembly, speech, and freedom of the press, such words assume a powerful urgency in the context of a president and administration determined to undermine them all.

As it conveys the sensory overload and evacuated significance that, from a certain perspective, characterize contemporary life, Assembly (Lorem Ipsum) challenges viewers to slow down, and rewards those who do with the satisfaction of finding meaning amid fragmented verbiage that embodies its absence. It is in that sense that Lum’s work goes beyond telling it like it is to offer those willing to do the work of completing her creative acts with the capacity to benefit from immersion, however brief, in a space where the visualization of information overload is precisely what effects a hunt for treasure—for whispers of meaning and truth.