Resisting style and autographic presence and working in a way that is frequently not central but rather in between, behind, or to the side, this thesis combines two related endeavours: (1) the attempt to develop, through an open-ended series of artifacts and exhibitions, an approach to working, employing (often collaborative) strategies of invisibility and the “super normal,” quotation and mimicry, tinkering, and “radical editing”; and (2) a practical investigation of the essential role of documentation—in particular photography, writing and language, and typography as they coalesce in printed ephemera—in art and design practices that are inconspicuous, ephemeral, or immaterial: how documentation reveals and preserves work that by its nature may not be evident or durable; how an art/design practice can occupy this role, contributing to the organization, presentation, and distribution of material while being inconspicuous or invisible itself; and how, in turn, this practice is made visible, if at all. These concerns have converged across a series of (often interrelated) projects, exhibitions, and publications in an ongoing process which the thesis exhibition continues, excerpts from, and documents.

The thesis privileges acts of observation, selection, organization (or disorganization or reorganization), clarification (or obfuscation), preservation, restoration, and alteration over acts of “creation,” and at the same time it embraces the fingerprints that accumulate through these procedures, multiplying across iterations which become variations which incrementally become new things: these fingerprints are the marks of continuous work.

The final exhibition was to include a bronze plaque, a statuette, and printed matter, including several “appendices” disconnected from a main text: a book documenting a series of fifteen exhibitions over the past eleven months, two volumes of photographs of refuse taken over the course of the fall and winter terms, and others. The work would also have extended to collaborative projects presented in the two simultaneous thesis exhibitions—Aisha Ali’s and Atanas Bozdarov’s—with which this one would have been interspersed, continuing the spirit of blurred and multiple authorship that has produced much of the work of the past year and a half or so. The exhibitions would have shared three rooms and the circulation space between them; this document includes a preliminary scheme for the exhibition as it might have looked.