Early Reflections | Andy Graydon

Early Reflections opens on Untitled (plate tectonics) — a sound installation made from a library of room recordings of visual art spaces that have been important in Graydon’s life. With each presentation of the work, a new record of that exhibition room is added. Sound emits from loudspeakers but also from exciters attached to the wood and glass of the gallery’s structure, allowing the building itself to conduct the vibrations of these past spaces. The show continues with audio, visual, multi-media works that range from the barely perceptible to full-building interventions including a sculptural collaboration with Cambridge, MA artist Katarina Burin. This is Andy Graydon’s first show with HAIR+NAILS and the launch of the gallery’s tenth season in Minneapolis.

In the artist’s words:

“In the language of acoustics, ‘early reflections’ are the first echoes of a sound that return to a listener. Early reflections are critical to defining a space’s characteristic reverberation: they give us an intuitive, often unconscious sense of the size and shape of the spaces we inhabit, as well as the position and movement of objects within them.

This exhibition traces an itinerary of my work on the relation of sound and architecture. The show places special emphasis on the structures—spatial, social and imaginative—produced by the interplay of voicing and listening. I have long been fascinated with sound’s role in constructing spaces, and the performative energy required to maintain their fragile integrity. My works pose questions that complicate the separation of looking and listening: how a call can articulate a space, but also how other projections—of light, but also of will, or of an idea—can articulate a material, while simultaneously rendering it ambiguous, toward a state between presence and absence. With this show I weave those questions together with a consideration of how the future and the past conduct one another, and the possibilities of authorship beyond the singular voice.

Just as the tension between imaginative projection and decay into ruin animates many individual works, the show as a whole is haunted by echoes of its own past lives. In a challenge to our fixation on currency and the urgency of the moment, much of the work on display doubles back on itself to disturb its own history—from updating and altering past works, to ongoing series that change with each iteration over long periods of time. The double meanings of ‘decay’ between sound and matter resonate here, as if to remind us that a voice in the present does not die, but lingers and transforms into the echo of the past in order to envelop and modulate the shapes of the future.”
— Andy Graydon

Artist Bio:

Andy Graydon is an artist and filmmaker originally from Maui, Hawai’i. His work is concerned with natural and social ecologies, and with sound and listening as creative practices. Recent projects have focused on island ecologies and the imaginal and narrative forms employed by the natural sciences. His projects frequently engage structures of music such as the ensemble, the score, improvisation and variation, and techniques of the voice.

Graydon’s work has been presented internationally including shows at the New Museum; Mass MoCA; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and the Honolulu Biennial. Grants and fellowships include the McKnight Foundation Fellowship in Media Arts; the MacDowell Fellowship; National Endowment for the Arts Grants for Arts Projects; Film Study Center at Harvard Fellowship; NKD Nordic Artists‘ Center Residency; and the Headlands Center for the Arts Residency. Graydon has collaborated widely as a sound artist and composer, including work with Jennifer Walshe, Ernst Karel, Michael Pisaro, Delia Gonzalez, Stephen Vitiello, France Jobin, Cecilia Lopez, John Hudak, and Jan St. Werner.

www.andygraydon.net
www.andygraydon.bandcamp.com
www.vimeo.com/andygraydon
Instagram: @notandygraydon

Gallery Hours:
walk-ins welcome: Thursdays/Fridays/Saturdays/Sundays 1:00-5:00 starting September 14 through November 1.
Also, appointments can be scheduled via hairandnailsart@gmail.com.

Image: ANDY GRAYDON detail of A Universal Syntax (2024/2017) 35mm slide projections and micro-controller