"Between the Walls and Me" is another work by the artist Joseph Grigely. It is stunning to come across these damaged walls and broken plaster and a plaster head on the floor! I couldn't figure out what happened here. Then I realized that it was an artwork.
Joseph Griegly had an accident at age 10 that made him deaf, and this is what he says about this work: "Between the Walls and Me is a cast stone copy of my head that was smashed into the MoCA gallery wall, damaging both the wall and my head. It lies on the floor, nose, chin, and ears broken and scarred, with the detritus of the contact littering the space: the busted bits of both of us. You can’t get around the reality of this experience. A person's disability does not exit solely in the present, as one kind of impairment or another; it is instead an individual's entire history with that impairment, and the accumulation of trauma that never really goes away. I use the term accretive anxiety to describe this phenomenon. Accretive anxiety involves the accretion of ableist-related experiences over a period of years, or even decades, and how this is assimilated by the body and mind, and how it gets reshaped into something else--even, sometimes, if you're lucky, art."
This is hard for me to view and comprehend. Did he actually become deaf by hitting his head at Mass MOCA when he was 10 years old? I looked at it early this morning and walked away. I googled him and it show current exhibit with all of the notes. Very strange. Much not more information.
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No, he hit his head as a ten year old boy, when he fell down a hill! So this artwork is about the frustration that he feels - as in "banging your head against a wall."
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