“I’m excited to see this as a culmination,” says Picard, 27, owner of Wicker Park’s Green Lantern Gallery. “When I first started working on this project, I was focused primarily on the novel. I just started working on these multimedia projects and it wasn’t until I’d gotten a little bit of distance from everything that I realized I was working through the same themes over and over again.”

The novel centers around a young woman named Bridget, whom the reader is introduced to as she sits on the steps of a bank before it opens, drunk and smoking cigarettes. It’s the morning of September 11, and she and her friends Neill and Malachi are simultaneously listless and excitable. They prod each other into eventually making their way to the coffee shop, where they learn of the day’s events.

Alarm bells sound in our head whenever we hear that September 11 has been invoked, but Picard is careful to use the event as a cultural touchstone. The book isn’t an attempt to explain September 11, or to use it as a metaphor for what’s happening in the characters’ lives—a particularly pernicious trend in the contemporary arts. Instead, it’s there to evoke a sort of coming of age for Bridget.

“Absolutely,” says Picard, when asked if she sees the novel as a coming-of-age tale. “But I also think that it’s relevant in terms of a contemporary mood. Bridget is a kind of antihero, she seems to be inspired by the idea of greatness, but not necessarily capable of fulfilling her own potential—what I also think is a common mood among young people.”Enter Fortuna, the superhero in the homemade costume, whose greatest strengths are posting bills where no bills are meant to be posted.

“I think the superhero ended up being a really important way to poke a little, make a joke,” she says. “I really like the way Fortuna, as a performance, as a superhero, literally integrates the fiction of a self-manufactured persona into day-to-day life.”

Which brings us to those paper cutouts mentioned earlier, on the other monitor in the gallery. They take the vague shapes of human ghosts, white silhouettes that float onscreen, in front of buildings and urban landscapes. Specters show up in the novel, too: “There are ghosts that come and nip in the night…. Just between waking and sleep, disembodied voices pipe up.”

Terrorism and ghosts, apathy and morning drunks—it’s no wonder Picard feels the need to create a superhero. Between Fortuna, and naming her gallery after the classic DC Comics alien-blessed badass, she clearly has a thing for caped crusaders.

“I think I’ve just always loved heroes,” she says. “But it’s hard for me to imagine that isn’t common to everyone. I guess it’s possible I’ve just always taken this for granted, so I can’t imagine otherwise. Maybe, too, it’s because heroes are the ones who make you want to survive.”

“Bygone(s)” is up at Around the Coyote Gallery (1935 1/2 W. North Ave) through March 1.