Emerging Artist Profile: Andy Graydon

by pmaxwell, 27 February 2008

Andy Graydon was born and raised in Maui, Hawaii and currently lives and works in New York City. Originally trained as a filmmaker, his art practice is focused on the interaction of media and environment. In the form of projected light and video installations, photographs, sound works, and architectural interventions that are attuned to site and context, his work explores the interplay of phenomenal, ecological, and social constructions that make up our composite notion of place.

Scaffold (32 NW 5th Ave), 2007

Scaffold (526 W 26th Street #310), 2006

Works such as the Scaffold series approach overlooked aspects of conventional architecture and use moving lines of projected light to foreground these seemingly blank spaces and reveal their obscured narratives. While formal in appearance, Scaffold complicates the ideas of pure form to which so much architecture aspires, exploring instead the destabilizing syntax of flux and force that architecture shares with sculpture and the time-based arts, in search of a more complex and interwoven awareness of the formation of everyday spaces.

Untitled (Inflections), 2007, four in a series of backlit transparency photographs

Other works, like the series of light box photographs Untitled (Inflections), taken in Hawaii, explore the perceptual as well as social construction of a seemingly “natural”, even Utopian, environment. Mediation itself (picture taking, image viewing, sound recording) is shown to be a form of “soft intervention” that creates a force on the landscape. Graydon’s photographs document the often conflicting physical, institutional and technological forces that create the complex field we call place.

18 Gray (Index Path), 2007, photograph in light box

In another light box photo work, 18 Gray (Index Path), a gray photo card is placed in front of the camera to record the qualities of light at each bend in a picturesque garden path. The card renders these changes in perception but simultaneously obscures the object of view, creating a strangely blank photographic environment that is entirely
about the photograph’s abilities rather than the environment it claims to represent.
Graydon’s work with sound continues this exploration and destabilizing of site: Chora takes recordings of silence (“room tone”) in the exhibition space and re-projects these
sounds of the location onto itself. Like a distorting acoustic mirror held up to the room,an uncanny version of the place is rendered using its own inherent energies.

Preliminary drawing for Chora, 2008, sound installation

Graydon describes works like Untitled (Inflections) and Chora as “science fiction ecologies,” suggesting that what is most important to his work are the speculative potentials that circulate through an environment – the what-ifs and the parallel dimensions; real and potential traumas and erasures; reversals of scale and time course; conflations of fictional and factual existence. Graydon’s work tries to engage with elements that will draw out the future dynamic from the present material existence.

Redoubt and Rejoinder, 2008, photograph in light box

Andy Graydon’s sound work is currently on view in New York at the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition “Unmonumental” through March 26. “Displacement”, a group show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn opens March 8. His first solo show in Chelsea, Untitled (Ground), will open in April at the LMAKprojects gallery.
www.andygraydon.net

Artist in his studio