he inscription could not have come as a surprise: Parr has long worked with language in a way that is pointed and political. An editioned print from the 1990s, titled , was made by opening the thesaurus and looking up the word “Synonymous,” which yielded the word “Equivalent,” which in turn yielded the word “Identical,” and then “Alike,” and so on, until at the bottom of the page, he arrived at the word “Dead.” As one word leads to another word, meaning is dragged and transmitted by contact. And what is language if not contact and transmission? This is a kind of contact print that, with each synonym, moves us towards that final word. Blind
