Andy Graydon: The Findings

Episode 4 in Frye Salon, 2013–14 season.

Fairies. Gorgons, dryads, nymphs, goblins... A Minotaur maybe? Elves, imps, changelings? Nøkken. A wraith? Revenants, wights, ghouls, spectres? Pixies. Gnomes. Menehunes. Extraterrestrials. Alien hunters, government agents, counter-intelligence forces. Seers, warlocks, Satanists, Dionysians. Drunks, anarchists. Werewolves?... 
–Excerpts from narration in The Findings

You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist. The hacienda must be built. 
–Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism” (1953)

Andy Graydon’s short Super-8 film The Findings follows its narrator on a walk into the woods to revisit a place that he can no longer find and to rediscover a thing he can’t quite find the words to articulate. The more he tries to describe the original experience, the less clear it becomes; with each attempt it is increasingly uncertain whether what he is describing ever existed. And yet he creates an object in the mind, a new “lost thing” that is suspended between narrator and viewer. The narrator’s original dérive, the experience he is now trying to recount, is in step with the viewer’s as revelations of thought, memory, and materiality—those elements that constitute our experience of the world—are redirected through creative acts of forgetting, obfuscation, and simply allowing the mind to wander.

Andy Graydon was born and raised in Maui, Hawaii, and currently lives in Berlin. His work explores the ecology of perception and how we construct the psychogeography of place. His films and installations present situations in which place, self-identity, the natural world, and the social fabric emerge together, interdependently. Graydon calls his projects “science-fiction ecologies,” highlighting his interest in the conflation of fact and fiction. They have been featured in exhibitions at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Hong Kong & Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, China; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; New Museum, New York; Portland Art Center, Oregon; and Program Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations, Berlin. Graydon has released sound works on imprints including Contour Editions, New York; Leerraum, Switzerland ; mAtter, Tokyo; Nonvisual Objects, Vienna; White_Line Editions, United Kingdom; and Winds Measure Recordings, New York.