The title of Stephen Lapthisophon’s exhibition, “Défense d’Afficher,” refers to signs forbidding the posting of printed materials on public walls (“post no bills”). But a deliberate mistranslation (typical of Lapthisophon’s approach) converts the phrase into a defense of such posting, a celebration of the multiplicities of communal signage and of how public walls communicate the practices and concerns of culture and the individual.

For This Will Kill That (all works 1999), Lapthisophon erected two ten-by-twenty-foot walls in the gallery and set them back to back. He then covered each wall with