NYAB Event - Andy Graydon "The Findings"

Andy Graydon "The Findings"

LMAKgallery

This event has ended.

LMAKprojects presents The Findings, Andy Graydon’s third solo exhibition with the gallery. This project finds Graydon grappling with the mutual transformations of thought and material that constitute the world, often through the creative work of forgetting, obfuscating, falsifying, or simply wandering away. His explorations are found in photographs, video, sculptures and a sound piece.

Throughout the gallery the sound of a voice narrates a walk into the woods to revisit an incredible place that the narrator can no longer find. The more he tries to describe the thing to us, the less clear anything about it is: his descriptions change with each attempt until it is unclear whether what he found ever existed. And yet it creates an object in the mind, and it this new ‘lost thing’ that is suspended between narrator and viewer. The film of The Findings is presented as a series of tiny moving images projected into specially produced books. Like an explorer’s notebooks or sketchbooks, they show the film as an open-ended unfolding and a constant process of discovery, wandering, and surprise.

Along the wall is a series of photographs taken along a familiar path for the artist, on the rim of Haleakala Crater in Maui, Hawaii. The walk was an exercise in trying to place himself in the position of the narrator of The Findings film: retracing one’s steps in order to recover a familiar and beloved thing, only to be surprised by its continuous metamorphosis. Things took a fittingly unexpected turn when the mountain became shrouded in an all-encompassing fog, turning a path the artist has known all his life into a foreign land. Recovering the landscapes in his mind’s eye became impossible, and Graydon was left to photograph the opaque atmosphere itself. The images are loaded and atmospheric, with subtle hints of the landscape that only appear when the viewer allows her eyes to adjust and succumb.

The two sculptural works in the show reflect on both the sound work and the landscape images. Graydon asked the art fabricator workshop Saygel & Schreiber to create an object based solely on the film’s texts – no further descriptions or guidance were given. The fabricators decided that the text itself was the object they were searching for and made a book: a unique, hand-produced hardcover book in nine different formats, from a stage play, to a song, a storyboard, a pop-up page, a transcription, and a series of optical illusion exercises. Rather than rendering the narration as a material thing, it materializes the infinity of creation that the text represents.

The second object took the form of a kind of decentered scavenger hunt set up by the art fabricators, involving a map found in a train station locker, a spinning top with a pencil for a spindle, and a traffic circle in north Berlin. Spinning the top across the surface of the map revealed three looping itineraries for exploratory walks across this banal but surprising site. And so we are led back around to the theme of the “lost walk”, connecting directly to the Grass House series and to the wandering narrated epiphanies that were the origin Graydon’s search: things come full circle, and are ever new, over and over again.

Media

• Sculpture
• Video installation

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