Modern Usage is a suite of works that speculates on future relations between image and body, voice and consciousness through explorations of deictic projection and the origins of language; bat echolocation tracking paths; surrealist drawing methods; and sensory deprivation experiments performed by artists.

The project originated with an invitation from the composer Jan St. Werner to experiment with a voice modeling engine he developed as a musical instrument. Graydon responded with a screenplay the pair used to train the voice models. The screenplay presents a dialogue between two figures who try to describe their physical reality in words, and continuously fail. The text draws from many sources including Robert Irwin and James Turrell’s research into sensory deprivation experiences, and the surrealist renderings of Raymond Roussel’s Instructions for 59 Drawings.

Printing the screenplay onto index cards, Graydon made the series of photographs presented here, Modern Usage (an unrealized screenplay), in which he arranges, folds and tears the cards into new hybrids of language, image and three-dimensional form. In an accompanying video work, the text is laid out in script order, becoming a set of on-screen instructions for creating the film in the mind of the reader.

Shown above: installation views, LOWW gallery, Tokyo, 2025; Hair+Nails gallery, Minneapolis, 2025