| I like to describe many of my recent projects as “science fiction ecologies,” suggesting that what is most important to me 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, and conflations of fictional and factual existence. My work tries to engage the future dynamic latent within the present material existence, inviting a transmigration of both the environment and the perceiving subject. | 
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Andy Graydon is an artist based in New York City. His work was on view at the New Museum’s exhibition The Sound of Things: Unmonumental Audio in March. Graydon’s sound installation project Untitled (Plate Tectonics) has been selected by Rhizome, the center for art and technology hosted by the New Museum, as one of its commissioned works for 2009.
Andy Graydon, Scaffold (32 NW 5th Ave), 2007. Video-projected light installation. Courtesy of the artist.
I like to describe many of my recent projects as “science fiction ecologies,” suggesting that what is most important to me 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, and conflations of fictional and factual existence. My work tries to engage the future dynamic latent within the present material existence, inviting a transmigration of both the environment and the perceiving subject.
I was born and raised in Maui, Hawaii, and trained originally as a filmmaker. Both experiences have been influential on my current work, which is focused on the interaction of media and environment in the forming of personal and social subjectivities. Taking the form of projected light and video installations, photographs, sound works, and architectural interventions that are attuned to site and context, my work explores the interplay of phenomenal, ecological, and social constructions that make up our composite notion of place.
For Untitled (Ground), my first solo show in New York at LMAKprojects in June, the islands of Hawaii constitute the “ground” of the show’s title, with sound and image recordings forming a kind of informal field study of a place that is at once exotic and yet intimately familiar to me, where personal memories and fixations are embedded in each location. However, I am not interested in documenting the site so much as entering into it as an imagined field of forces, a place that is in both literal and figurative transformation. If this is a ground of being or experience, it is shown to be unstable, malleable, and creative—a field that generates multiple meanings without being reducible to any one itself. From within this field, I want to draw attention to the various flows, projections, and markings that are communicated between the environment and myself as its subject.
Works such as the Scaffold series (2006-present) and Free Verse (2008) use projected lines of light to create confusions of image and architectural material, hovering between real and rendered space. A pocket dimension is opened between the two, in which we can recognize architecture as a force in flux, where our space is not simply a given but rather is constantly being negotiated.
My work with sound continues this exploration and destabilizing of site: Chora (2008) 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 transformed energies. As with Scaffold, these sound works open a hybrid dimension that complicates any simple distinction between a mediated and a “natural” environment. All of my work is driven by a fascination with these interstitial zones of perceptual and social interaction.
