Joseph Grigely b. 1956, East Longmeadow, Massachusetts Joseph Grigely's art threads speech with writing to produce a kind of acoustical image. Deafened in a childhood accident, the artist was educated at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, New England College, and Oxford University in England. He began to exhibit in the 1990s, creating assemblages and installations out of scraps of paper that record scribbled names, notes, and conversations with interlocutors unfamiliar with American Sign Language. While invoking the grid and the monochrome, these works also use language to undermine the autonomy and opticality preserved by those cherished modernist devices. At the same time, these hybrid arrangements refer to the still life, redirecting the genre's attention to the throwaway odds and ends of everyday life. Wassily Z., Vienna, June 9, 1997, 1998 R-print, edition 2/3, 3 x 4 1/2 inches (7.6 x 11.4 cm) This is one of three photographic portraits in the exhibition that record the hand at rest and in the process of scribbling and doodling on white sheets of paper. The inscribed texts are not consistently legible, but they identify a particular individual; their idiosyncratic graphic marks also visualize the inflections of speech. The hand serves as the conduit for the translation of auditory event into visual representation. The manual production of that representation also draws out the condition of writing that structures photographic reproduction: The photograph not only transcribes but recodes the artist's conversations as an exchange between the languages of quotidian communication and of aesthetic practice. —Melanie Mariño