Joseph Grigely: In What Way Wham? | MASS MoCA
In the mid-1990s Grigely first exhibited his ongoing series, Conversations With the Hearing, composed of notes written during conversations with people who do not know sign language. They are conversations from daily encounters with family, friends, and strangers. These notes are central to the new commission White Noise which consists of two intersecting oval rooms that surround the viewer with thousands of handwritten conversation papers. The rooms, each roughly twenty-five feet across, in the triple-height space of the museum’s first-floor gallery showcases three decades of conversational exchanges. The phrase “White Noise” is used by audiologists to describe a noise that occupies a wide bandwidth of random frequencies. For his own White Noise, Grigely provides a visual equivalent of this experience, immersing viewers in the space between speech and writing with floor-to-ceiling notes; one room in shades of white and the other in a cacophony of color.
austinkleon
