Joseph Grigely

Statement

For the past fifteen years my work has explored the ways conversation and conversational discourse might be represented as a visual experience: most people know what a conversation sounds like, but what does a conversation look like? What if we were able to look at the world with the sound turned off? What would this world reveal?

This is the privilege of being deaf, and of making from a disabling condition an enabling experience. When people who do not know sign language talk with me, I explain that I am deaf and ask them to write – a mode of communication that is simple without being simplistic, and generally inclusive. But what gets written is often quite unlike writing in the usual sense: there are gaps, crossed-out words, drawing, lines, all of which looks less like writing that it does talking on paper. It is by using these scraps of paper on which people have written notes, names, or phrases in order to 'converse' with me that I make much of my art, using such scraps of conversations to make wall pieces, books, and table-top tableaux that all take as their subject matter the ineluctable differences between speech and writing, and reading and listening.

Cold Comfort -2006 That's What We Live For / Round Conversations - 2006 We're Bantering Drunkening About What's Important in Life - 2007 We're Bantering Drunkening About What's Important in Life (detail) - 2007
Cold Comfort
pigment print
9.5" x 5.5"
That's What We Live For / Round Conversations
fabricated urethane buckets / paper plates, napkins, circular paper
9.5" x 5.5" / 65" diameter
We're Bantering Drunkening About What's Important in Life
ink, pencil on paper
46" x 168"
We're Bantering Drunkening About What's Important in Life
ink, pencil on paper
46" x 168" (detail)
The Conversation Was Going Well Without Me - 2007 Hop Frog 3, 2005 - collaboration with Amy Vogel Hop Frog 3, 2005 - collaboration with Amy Vogel (detail) St. Cecelia - production still - 2007
The Conversation was Going Well Without Me
ink, pencil on paper
57" x 44"
Hop Frog 3, 2005 - collaboration with Amy Vogel (detail)
fiberglass and urethane
57" x 16" x 15"
Hop Frog 3, 2005 - collaboration with Amy Vogel (detail)
fiberglass and urethane
57" x 16" x 15"
St. Cecilia
production still
2007