The Findings
2013, mixed media installation, LMAK Projects, New York
The installation form of The Findings finds Graydon grappling with the mutual transformations of thought and material that constitute the world. The Findings explores the creative work of forgetting, obfuscating, falsifying, and simply wandering away. These wanderings are traced in photographs, video, books, sculptures and a sound piece.
Throughout the exhibition the sound of a voice narrates a walk into the woods to revisit an incredible place that the narrator can no longer find. The more he tries to describe the thing to us, the less clear anything about it is: his descriptions change with each attempt until it is unclear whether what he found ever existed. And yet it creates an object in the mind, and it this new ‘lost thing’ that is suspended between narrator and viewer. Every other object in the gallery stages an attempt to complete this search, only to open it on to further questions and further mysteries of language, figuration and imagination.
Halemau’u (The Grass House)
2012, chromogenic prints from 35mm transparencies
The Grass House is a series of eight photographs taken along a familiar path for the artist, on the rim of Haleakala Crater in Maui, Hawai’i. The walk was meant to be an exercise in placing himself in the narrator’s position in The Findings: of retracing one’s steps in order to recover a familiar and but lost thing, only to be surprised by its continuous metamorphosis. Fittingly, the walk took an unexpected turn when the mountain became shrouded in an all-encompassing fog, obscuring all recognizable features. Recovering the landscapes in his mind’s eye became impossible, and Graydon was left to photograph the opaque atmosphere itself.
The Findings (Volume One)
2013, two hardcover books and video projection
Like an explorer’s notebooks or sketchbooks, Volume One present a series of textual and graphical environments that interact with specially prepared moving image projections from The Findings.
The books aren’t read in a customary fashion but rather are intended to be configured by the reader as micro-screening environments for the miniature video projection of Super 8 film footage. Imagery and text from one spread of pages is often completed in the corresponding pages of the second book. By placing the books in different arrangements — one folded open and the other standing behind it; or nested together in a four-panel screen, for instance — Volume One allows for endless reconfigurations of the textual and topographical wanderings of The Findings.
The Findings (Volume Two)
2013, artist book
For this continuation of The Findings project, Graydon asked the art fabrication workshop Saygel & Schreiber to create an object based solely on the voice narration of The Findings. No further descriptions or guidance were given.
The fabricators decided that the text itself was the object they were searching for, and made a book: a unique, hand-produced hardcover book in nine different formats, from a stage play, to a song, a storyboard, a pop-up page, a transcription, and a series of optical illusion exercises. Rather than rendering the narration as a material object, it materializes the infinity of creation that the text represents.
The Findings (Volume Three: Schnitzeljagd)
2013, fabricated sculptural objects, photographs, super 8 film
For this continuation of The Findings project, Graydon asked the art fabrication workshop Saygel & Schreiber to create an object based solely on the voice narration of The Findings. No further descriptions or guidance were given.
The second commissioned object took the form of a scavenger hunt set up by the art fabricators, involving a map found in a train station locker, a spinning top with a pencil for a spindle, and a traffic circle in north Berlin. Spinning the top across the surface of the map revealed three looping itineraries for exploratory walks across this banal but surprising site. In performing the itineraries defined by these objects, Graydon was led back around to the theme of the “lost walk”, connecting directly to the Grass House series of photographs and to the wandering narrated epiphanies that were the origin of Graydon’s search.