Home — Andy Graydon

A needle rides the grooves of a vinyl record, emitting a rumbling drone, a motif echoed by dim Super-8 films of rocks tumbling in wooden sluices; additional footage of lava beds and ocean vistas is interrupted by bright flares of light. Across the darkened gallery, flickering white striations are projected onto dead fluorescent light tubes. All the objects are scattered about the floor, including a tall, narrow plywood box lit from within and a photo of Mauna Kea’s astronomical observatories with their retractable viewing slits. The Hawai’i-born artist’s carefully calibrated environment leavens weird science into a paradise that blooms from molten volatility.
- The Village Voice, Best in Show

Untitled (Ground)
2008
mixed media installation

Andy Graydon’s “Untitled (Ground)" is a subtle, elliptical, haunting meditation on the inadequacy of the tools we use to come to grips with our environment, and our comic mishandling of them. He works primarily in sound, as well as film and video, and he is keenly interested in how the machines he uses — cameras, audio recording devices — color any attempt at "documentation" of his source material. This show includes work in these genres, plus photography, sculpture, and an arresting hybrid of object and video projection titled "Free Verse." In it, footage of a bunch of fluorescent bulbs, one of them flickering, is projected onto its physical double, bringing the inert pileup to life. In method, if not effect, this work is reminiscent of Robert Whitman's combines of film and sculpture in the mid-1960s.

Images of Mr. Graydon's native Hawaii feature in "Untitled (aina)," a 26-minute-long video loop that is derived from Super 8 film. Flickering, grainy footage of that otherworldly landscape is interspersed with extended views of a murky sunrise, a mining operation's digging equipment and conveyor belt, the ocean's horizon, and a treeless hill with an orange banner flapping madly in the foreground. The sequence is seen in two versions, side by side. At times, they are nearly in tandem, while at others they diverge, as one channel lingers over a particular motif or jumps ahead as if to promise a narrative that never emerges.

Meanwhile, through a quartet of speakers is heard the rumble of a bus and a tour guide's comments on the Hawaiian landscape, processed almost beyond recognition. At times it is barely audible, leaning toward guttural and abstract. The audio works, called "Untitled (letter to Peter Giles)" in a nod to Thomas More's "Utopia," are delivered via three one-of-a-kind phonograph records. They are just a few minutes long, and the repetitive white noise of the turntable's needle stuck in a groove hangs over the exhibition until the gallery staff changes the record, contributing a pedestrian element of performance.

The exhibition checklist indicates various works as discrete pieces, but with ambient audio in the dim gallery, "Untitled (Ground)" is easily read as an installation. All the work rests on the floor. Meandering power lines, cables, and wires constitute a landscape of its own and blur the distinction between the art on view and the equipment used to produce it. Four 12-inch-square photographic transparencies, each called "Untitled (inflection)," are crudely backlit by a pair of naked fluorescent bulbs. They are shots of a lush forest floor with a ghostly line of light embedded in the emulsion. Lying flat on the floor, the fifth in the series depicts an astronomical observatory, a machine for seeing.

- Stephen Maine, The New York Sun