Andy Graydon was born and raised in Maui, Hawaii and currently lives and works in New York City. Originally trained as a filmmaker, his art practice is focused on the interaction of media and environment. In the form of projected light and video installations, photographs, sound works, and architectural interventions that are attuned to site and context, his work explores the interplay of phenomenal, ecological, and social constructions that make up our composite notion of place.
Graydon describes many of his works as “science fiction ecologies,” suggesting that what is most important to his work 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; conflations of fictional and factual existence. Graydon’s work tries to engage with elements that will draw out the future dynamic from the present material existence.
Graydon’s sound work is currently on view in New York at the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibition “Unmonumental” through March 26. “Displacement”, a group show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn opens March 8. His first solo show in Chelsea, Untitled (Ground), will open in April at the LMAKprojects gallery.
Chora For began its life in November 2007 as a series of “room tone” recordings (field recordings of an empty or silent space) in the Light and Sound Gallery at the Portland Art Center in Portland, Oregon. These recordings of “nothing”, or of the background noise of the room itself, have been filtered, processed, and arranged into forms that evoke the dynamics of that original space, with the intent of using those dynamics to “excite” new architectural spaces of listening – geographically distant performance spaces, home environments, and other exhibition spaces. Chora For opens a multiple or overlayed space of listening in which the effects and mediations of diffused sounds can create a new awareness, an acoustic and imaginal awareness, of the space of listening – both as a real, existing space, and as a speculative, utopian space of sound.
Ray Sweeten b.1975. Audio origins begin with antiquated tape experiments based on recorded correspondences between his late father and brother. In ‘89 he studied classical piano and theory at the University of Rhode Island. In ‘93 Sweeten entered the TIMARA program (Technology In Music And Related Arts) at Oberlin Conservatory. In ‘98 he acquired a residency at Fabrica, spa.Italy, where he collaborated with Michael Galasso (ECM), Robert Wilson, Chieko Mori (Tzadik). He also produced music for MTV Japan and Italy, Benetton, and performed frequently throughout Italy and Europe solo and with FabricaMusica, a collaborative ensemble comprised of musicians from diverse cultural and musical backgrounds. Ray moved to New York City in 2000 to work for Children’s Television Workshop where he provided music for CD-Rom/Web games, cell phones and broadcast television. He received the Van Lier Residency for experimental electronics and oscilloscope graphics. He was also a member of the Plantains, a multi-media synth-pop outfit, and released work on Suction Records, Kinetic Media, They Shoot Homos Don’t They, Ghostly, and Colette. Sweeten has performed and screened at The Kitchen, Monkey Town, Millennium Film Project, The New York Underground Film Festival, CinemaTexas, Liverpool Biennial, Pacific Film Archive, Chicago Filmmakers, Aurora Picture Show and Angel Orensantz. Sweeten’s work as a video artist is also rooted in a notion of the historical, as he deals primarily with an oscilloscope (used as early as 1950 by animator Ben Laposky, and evoking early abstractions by early computer art pioneer John Whitney). As a visual artist working with analog and digital techniques, his work presents a stunning intersection between the early roots of the medium and offers mesmerizing glimpses of its future.