SINCE LOSING HIS hearing, Joseph Grigely has communicated with friends and others by exchanging notes. Several of the works in his retrospective, "Ten Years of Conversations," are constructed from these memos, apparently written on whatever happened to be handy at the time: note cards, receipts, folded-up flyers. They're grouped in rectangles for visual effect – all blue, all white, or patterned – and present language as a visual artifact, calling attention to handwriting as a kind of drawing. As fragments of conversations, his notes are also heavily weighted with significance, referring beyond themselves to imagined exchanges. They create a kind of poetry, documenting a remarkably natural language that's neither entirely sensible nor nonsensical. Other pieces join differently organized constellations of particularly vivid notes with written reflections on how a deaf person experiences language. In one piece, Grigely describes having watched two sales clerks relish a conversation as they wrapped Christmas presents. Afterward he asked them what they were talking about. Posted above the story is a Season's Greetings card with "SEX" written on it. In all of these works, Grigely studies human relations under the aspect of one specific control: no hearing or voice. (In fact, Grigely's project began as academic research on language and literature he only belatedly came to recognize as an art practice.) Another piece articulates a history of the deaf, approaching the relationship between sound and vision from a different angle. Under a representative photograph of a deaf child on a doctor's lap, Grigely describes how pictures of children learning to sign are difficult to find because doctors historically treated the deaf by trying to teach them to speak. Away from this scientific supervision, deaf children taught one another how to sign. But Grigley's art isn't always silent. In You, he has recorded people pronouncing and mispronouncing the name of his friend, artist Ed Ruscha. The result is a hilarious sputtering of different sounds that calls attention to the disconnect between written and spoken language, as well as the musical properties of words. Tues.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m., (first Thurs., 11 a.m.-8 p.m.), 701 Mission, S.F. $6, $3 seniors, students, and youths, free for members (free the first Tuesday of the month). (415) 978-ARTS. (Clark Buckner)