Words take on a new meaning

In Joseph Grigely’s subtle, stunning new video, “St. Cecilia,” the conductor of a silken-voiced chamber choir raises his hands and launches the group into song. Depending on where you sit in the Orange County Museum of Art’s installation of Grigely’s two-channel piece, you might hear the familiar lyrics of “Silent Night” or you might hear these words, sung to the same tune: “Cy licks light, holy fright. Call his mom, call his bride. Round old Fergie’s mother and child. Old shivers so send her a smile. Tell me everything please, tell me everything please.”

More likely still, you might think you’re hearing the expected words but sense that something is amiss. Shots projected on the left and right sides of the screen appear to be taken from various perspectives during a performance of each of the three songs the group sings. Until the final verse of “Silent Night,” the footage is actually split: Those on the left are singing the conventional lyrics, while those on the right sing alternate versions by Grigely. In the end, Grigely’s lyrics win out, and singers on both sides intone: “Sighing night, holy sight. Winter’s jaw loves the night. With the honey hell they’ll sing. Hello you to our King. Christ, the stranger is here. Cheese and salad are here.”

Funny and amusing, yes, but also disconcerting. What we see, what we hear and what we know have become misaligned. Which is to be trusted: The eyes? The ears? The mind?

Grigely’s revisions of old standards (the others are “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas” and “My Favorite Things”) use words that look the same as the traditional lyrics when lip-read, which is why the discrepancy is hard to pick out merely by watching the video. Words misheard enough to alter meaning are called mondegreens, after a thought-you-said misinterpretation of a line (“laid him on the green”) in a Scottish ballad. They are common enough in the hearing world but naturally assume greater consequence for the deaf, who are dependent on lip-reading.

Grigely lost his hearing when he was 10, and his art of the last 15 years or so has explored the dynamics of communication from a fresh, demanding new place. In “Remembering is a difficult job, but Somebody has to do it,” a video installation at the museum’s South Coast Plaza annex, the Orange Lounge, Grigely is shown sitting at a witness table, as if called to deliver testimony. In response to signed prompts, he sings what he remembers of the “Gilligan’s Island” theme song plus a few commercial jingles. That his limited aural memory is partly taken up by such drivel comes across as both comic and tragic. Another video at the lounge has appealing visual texture but never quite lifts off, hampered in part by having to compete with mall Muzak seeping into the gallery.

The most provocative of the five works recently on view at the museum’s two venues (a sixth had yet to be installed at the lounge a month into the exhibition) focuses attention on where the visual and aural realms meet -- on how sound looks.

“We’re Bantering Drunkening about What’s Important in Life” is a new piece in an ongoing series of “Conversations With the Hearing,” in which Grigely mounts groupings of handwritten snippets saved from multiple exchanges. The unknown conversationalists each have a voice, on paper, but it is Grigely who orchestrates the fragments.

The OCMA piece consists of hundreds of small sheets assembled across two walls, mosaic-style, like a jaunty, message-board Mondrian. The sheets on one half are variants of white and cream, and on the other, bright golds, blues, pinks and greens. Grigely transforms verbal into visual on a macro scale enticing enough to draw us closer, where we can then consider individual messages, idiosyncrasies of handwriting, annotated sketches, each sheet of paper’s texture and place of origin.

Diary, collage, archive -- the work reads as a kind of concrete poetry built of everyday exchange and intimate revelation. Some notes bear single words and others mundane communications about clogged toilets and airport departure taxes. Still others seem extracted from substantive conversations about sex, relationships, identity, food and wine. The whole pulses with life, friendship, humor.

Grigely, who teaches art history at the University of Michigan, makes a profound contribution to the assemblage tradition through such works. Each element of the installation has its own personally charged history. Each probably provides its own Proustian madeleine moment for the artist. For us, as sanctioned eavesdroppers, the notes assume new status in their new context; they remain resonant with the past while being stubbornly enshrined in the present.

A smaller “Conversation” piece at OCMA treats written notes as mementos, individually framed on a partial mantelpiece. One particularly poignant sheet contains an anecdote about a woman who discovered her baby was blind when he didn’t crawl on schedule. Mentioned almost incidentally is the baby’s ability to imitate the sound of an approaching car and the hum of a refrigerator, one sense compensating for the absence of another.

Those with senses intact typically focus more on what those systems deliver (smells, sights and so on) than on how they operate, much less undermine or reinforce one another. With penetrating charm, Grigely’s work has us recognizing communicative lapses, gaps and interstices that we didn’t know were there.

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Joseph Grigely

Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach; and Orange Lounge at South Coast Plaza, 3333 Bear St., Costa Mesa

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday and Friday through Sunday and 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday (museum); 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Sunday (lounge)

Ends: Jan. 6

Price: $10 (museum); free (lounge)

Contact: (949) 759-1122 or www.ocma.net