recent common ancestor

""In biology and genealogy, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of any set of organisms is the most recent individual from which all the organisms are directly descended."

- Wikipedia, 1/29/2019

In 2010 I began a project of photographing things that looked the same but were not, using color as a grouping mechanism.

Several years later, working from the central question of "When is it no longer a thing but another thing?" and returning to the previous point of focus to examine an ongoing set of ontological questions about identity and naming I spent 6 weeks in late 2012/early 2013 building an installation in the Mills Gallery in Boston during open hours. I made objects, images, and text, always with an eye to the precarity of definition. I installed the work as I made it. Years later I am far more comfortable with the images and objects than with my words. I am unsure if this is due to a heightened malleability of the visual, a need for linguistic acuity and precision (and revision over time), or a measure of my relative levels of craft. I am always my own experiment.

Items in the installation included: black and white photocopies of several bound covers of the journal Texte zur Kunst (all of the images were black), extreme closeup photographs of the cover of 2 duplicate Miranda July books, identical gold ornaments clipped to a barcoded piece of wood, and a video of my hand signing (ASL) the starting question "When is it a thing no more but another thing?"