“All projections into external reality are as much projections of ignorance as of knowledge…” Alan Balfour, Berlin: The Politics of Order

LMAKprojects is pleased to present Andy Graydon’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Vostok, Faretheewell is the artist’s newest and most ambitious Super-8 film project to date. The 36-minute film explores the city of Berlin, and uses it as a lens to examine various modes of suspension, of incompleteness, of being in-between.

The film follows Yukitomo, a Japanese designer who, while touristing in Berlin, is unexpectedly called by a Korean movie company to create the 3D computer model for a space ship (named the Vostok) in a Science Fiction film. The camera follows the character as he takes photos not of the great vistas of Berlin, but close-ups of surface details and materials, which he uses to “skin” the model of his space ship.

Vostok, Faretheewell is about visions (artistic, political, architectural) as forms of power, and about the de-formations and re-formations they endure on encountering the material world. Graydon traces this in Yukitomo’s struggle to design his model, and in a parallel narrative about the history of Berlin itself, as written in its architectural environments. It is a history of power and conflicting ideas of order, each leaving overlapping traces in the city’s material reality. Berlin is seen as a world in the process of formation and re-formation, defined by provisional measures, aborted completions, attempts at erasure, constant renewals, and shifting cycles of competing interests.

The film is accompanied by a series of letterpress prints drawn from the research sources in architecture and music composition Graydon used in making the film. The works focus on the shifting nature of the plan, the projection, the model, as it slides between future and past. Failed utopias are never simply failed: living amphibiously, with one foot in past ideologies yet with eyes still fixed on the image of a future order, these forms constitute the material reality of the present. The Vostok becomes a model not only for a mutating space ship in a fantastical film, but also for a city in the constant process of using its materials of the present to orchestrate perhaps not something new, but something else entirely.

Andy Graydon (1971, Maui, Hawai) is an artist and filmmaker based in Berlin. His work focuses on the relationship between media and environment. He was awarded a Rhizome Commission in 2009 for the creation of Untitled (plate tectonics), a sound installation, which was exhibited at Program in Berlin, and Marian Spore in New York. Geomancy, a collection of film and sound works, was released on dvd+cd by the Tokyo label mAtter in 2009. In 2008 Graydon was included in the New Museum’s inaugural exhibition Unmonumental. In 2007 his installation Room Works was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Portland Art Center, Oregon. His most recent sound work, Erased Cage, will be exhibited at the Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna in 2011.