Joseph Grigely and Amy Vogel

Joseph Grigely, who lost his hearing in an accident when he was ten, fuels our drive to eavesdrop with his scraps of conversations jotted down on bits of paper. These works are represented by Blueberry Surprise, 2003, a “narrative” of ten years’ phrases arranged by paper color. Also in this show is a fiberglass dog, based on a Canaletto painting, and the hilarious Remembering is a difficult job but somebody has to do it, 2004, a video installation (complete with palm trees) showing Grigely trying to remember the theme from the American TV classic Gilligan’s Island. The French have their own version of Survivor, but they don’t know Gilligan and his shipwrecked mates, so Remembering . . . brings questions of translation and cultural specificity to the fore. In a separate space, Amy Vogel presents “The Temptation to Be Good,” a series of her signature pale candy-colored paintings. Precious at first sight, her layered, milky, translucent surfaces reveal an imaginary female creature engaged in various erotic frolics. Even more delicious is Vogel and Grigely’s jointly produced work, Hop Frog #1, 2005, a white chandelier housing tiny Vogel-created beasts, which tilts at an angle and is tied with a red cord to a cinder block on the ground. The artists were inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s eponymous short story, about a grotesque dwarf jester that gets his revenge on the obscene King that he serves by stringing him and his courtiers up on a chandelier.