Mouths appear regularly in Ann Hamilton’s work, as both the locus of human meaning-making (speech) and the public-facing frontier of basic life functions (eating, breathing, desiring). In a 1999 essay on Hamilton, poet and literary critic Susan Stewart wrote, “At the mouth, need is transformed into desire.”(aleph • video) shows a close-up of Hamilton rolling round stones in her mouth. Over the course of half an hour, different mouth movements–and the sounds resulting from the rotation and the collision of the stones–begin to repeat with slight variations and form a rich lexicon of their own, not unlike human speech. Periodically, stones come very close to falling out of the artist’s mouth, and their constant movement gradually scrapes at the rouge on her lips. (aleph • video) was part of a larger installation titled aleph, shown at the MIT List Visual Arts Center in 1992, and was editioned in 1993. According to the artist, “The title derives from the discussion of the letter ‘aleph’ in the book ABC: The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind by Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. Their explication reveals that the sound and the name of the letter ‘aleph’ derive from the shape the larynx takes as it moves from silence to speech.”