Joseph Grigely
St. Cecilia
May 6 – August 19, 2007

We’re Drunken Bantering about What’s Important in Life, 2007
Ink and graphite on paper

Joseph Grigely creates works that explore the idiosyncrasies of language and the dynamics of everyday communication. Grigely has been deaf since the age of ten, a factor that has shaped his work and become a central aspect of his artistic practice. Grigely first became known in the early 1990s for a series of works he called Conversations with the Hearing. These works were generated from the handwritten notes produced by the hearing world during conversations with Grigely, when someone does not know sign language and when lip-reading proves difficult. Many of these works feature several scraps of paper pinned to the wall, each revealing a fragment of a past dialogue and the spontaneous, discursive nature of conversation. With these works, Grigely asks the question: “We presumably know what a conversation sounds like—but what does a conversation look like?”

Production still of St. Cecilia
Photo by Dan Meyers

Most recently Grigely has expanded his inquiry to an exploration of music. These works mine his own memories of music as a child and foreground his current relationship to music as an adult--experiencing music “with the sound turned off.” Grigely’s new exhibition brings together a number of recent works in sound, video, and installation and features a newly-commissioned video installation entitled St. Cecilia. Named after the patron saint of music, this work explores the nuances in the relationship between seeing and hearing and how these experiences inform what we understand. St. Cecilia features the Baltimore Choral Arts Society chamber choir singing several beloved Christmas carols with new lyrics written by Grigely that reflect the misunderstandings and confusions of lip-reading.

In St. Cecilia we see footage of the choir members on two screens appearing as if they are singing the same song, when in actuality, the words being sung on each side are vastly different from one another. With the sound tracks of each song version isolated and separated in the installation, a viewer can have various aural experiences of this work—one of silence, one with the sound of familiar lyrics, and one that reveals Grigely’s new lyrics. With two sets of lyrics sung to the same music, and with words that look virtually the same on the lips, we are reminded of the humor and misunderstandings of mondegreens—the mishearing of words that, when relayed, result in a complete change of meaning. These slips in language explore errors of perception, as evidenced by mistakes in closed-captioning texts, by the mishearing of song lyrics, or by misunderstandings of speech--common examples of the pitfalls of communication that are possible every day, even with the simplest exchange.

St. Cecilia is co-organized by the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs. Joseph Grigely’s new video installation, St. Cecilia, is co-produced by the Contemporary Museum and the Orange County Museum of Art.

Major support for St. Cecilia provided by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Baltimore County Commission on Arts and Sciences, and Cohan and Leslie, New York.