#86: Andy Graydon

Andy Graydon’s work explores the interstitial spaces between sound and video. His recordings and layered performances, which integrate diverse field recordings with electro-acoustic compositions, unhinge known sonic territories and open up environments that allow listeners to experience natural or found sound in new ways. Graydon claims a variety of influences including musique concrète, minimalist and environmental art, cinema auteurs, and the constellation of artists and musicians he works with today. His recent works have increasingly approached what the artist describes as a “science fiction ecology”, in which he engages with the speculative future state of a given environment, often in flux or crisis. – Lauren Cornell, Executive Director, Rhizome

Graydon’s films train our vision on processes of materialization rather than upon objects themselves. These films attempt to arrest moments that haunt the wings of the material world’s stage, from nostalgia and the traces of the past, to the ellipses and guesswork of the present, to the suspense and speculation that define futurity. Graydon’s interest in these undecided zones has led him to work with improvised music and performance, with ekphrastic speech and mental projection, with architectural and infrastructural modeling, and with the cultures of scientific inquiry.

Wrongdoing, 2017, 15:00 min
Presented in a special cinema edit for Videoart at Midnight, Wrongdoing revisits and re-appropriates from Graydon’s ongoing Berlin-based project The Findings. A stuttering and looping meditation on rehearsal as a model for existence, it appears in episodes between the other works in the program.

The Transect in Three or Four Modes of Observation, 2017, 30:00 min
The Transect follows two Portuguese ecologists as they search for traces of the elusive Ope’ape’a bat, the only land mammal indigenous to the Hawaiian islands. Their arguments over method prove as illuminating as their findings.

Clean Room Light Trap, 2017, 15:00 min
Equal parts flicker film and ethnography of science reel, the film presents a technician building telescope parts in the “clean room” at the Institute for Astronomy in Honolulu, and simultaneously details the construction of a “light trap” to attract nocturnal insects for entomological study. Through a strobing alternation the two images come to form a single dynamic space that hovers in the intervals of the flicker.

 

The work of American artist Andy Graydon (b. 1971, Maui, Hawaii) explores experiences of absence and displacement, such as those encountered in travel, in writing and in recording. This work across media has been exhibited, screened, performed and published internationally, including shows at the New Museum, Art in General, and Participant Inc. (all New York); Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA; Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City; Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii; the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture; Galerie Stadtpark, Krems, Austria; WRO Media Arts Bienniale, Wroclaw, Poland; and PROGRAM Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations, Berlin. Awards include a Rhizome Commission and grants from the Princess Grace Foundation, the Laila Twigg-Smith Art Fund and the Experimental Television Center. Graydon received his MFA in Radio, Television, and Film from Northwestern University, and is currently based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Maui, Hawaii.