J.C. Grigely & Co.: Ordinary Conversations

1996, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Yellow book cover for J.C. Grigely & Co.: Ordinary Conversations featuring the price, title and location in small black text.
Publisher
1996, MIT List Visual Arts Center
Details

ISBN: 0-938437-53-4 paper, 32pages, b/w illus.

Joseph Grigely was artist-in-residence at the MIT List Visual Arts Center during the Fall of 1996 and created an installation entitled Ordinary Conversations. Grigely, who became deaf as a result of a childhood accident often askes people to write down what they are saying when he is unable to read their lips due to speech idiosyncrasies. For the past several years, Grigely has incorporated these conversations into his art, creating wall pieces and table-top tableaux or still lifes of the notes and scraps generated from exchanges with gallery visitors over the course of his projects. His work explores the differences between speech and writing, reading and listening. The catalogue for the LVAC exhibition takes the form of an artist’s book, which Grigely conceives of as a “catalogue” of some of the conversations he has had, and includes reproductions of some of the more interesting, wry, and telling notes people have written to him.