The work of New York-based Mike Rollins uses the lingual abstraction created by the daily stock market ticker as its main formal and conceptual grounding. The codes and morphology inherent to the stock ticker system are often impossible for the general population to parse. By using a combination of real and imagined stock symbols, Rollins creates a new language - one whose nature is cryptic, yet with a purpose that is implicitly communicative. Fragments of words are combined into new proverbial texts borrowed from such disparate sources as poetry, entertainment tropes, and modern colloquialisms. To absorb the phraseology of each painting is at first disconcerting, with familiar lexical combinations frustratingly difficult to interpret. However, there is a sense of humor at play, as the cracking of the code almost invariably results in a specific kind of rhetorical joke. By placing new limits on a form of vernacular which simultaneously inhibits and creates categorical understanding, the ticker paintings allegorically reference the chaos of communication and the tenuous general perceptions of world markets.