Platform 23: Andy Graydon, City Lights Orchestra

Andy Graydon often creates sound-based installations, films, and sculptures to address themes of community, history, and language. He is drawn to second-hand objects that reveal traces of their history, questioning how their meaning changes when placed in a new context. For his original PLATFORM commission, Graydon has created a series of sculptural instruments made from discarded street lamps. Rather than casting light, the lamps in City Lights Orchestra are intended to resonate with sound. Sourcing most of the hollow plastic forms from Cambridge, Graydon based the sculptures on worldly instruments including Taiko drums and the Indonesian gamelan, a musical device characterized as “one instrument played by many people.” The gamelan is typically comprised of a large set of bells, drums, and gongs that create a signature percussive music when played collectively. Graydon’s version mimics the traditional gamelan design, with the repurposed plastic globes arranged as table-top bonang or suspended from metal frames like gong ageng. City Lights Orchestra also incorporates references to Japanese Taiko drums, the sculptural instruments of American composer Harry Partch, and the Futurists’ intonarumori.

City Lights Orchestra complements other sound-inspired sculptures in the Sculpture Park, from the nearby Musical Fence (1980) by Paul Matisse, to Nancy Winship Milliken’s Pasture Song (2018) made from used cello bow strings, and even Ron Rudnicki’s Rain Gates (2000), in which the sound of trickling water descending the hillside becomes a subtle score to visitors’ experience of the landscape. Installed in an S-shaped formation, City Lights Orchestra is intended to take on a variety of roles, depending on who is approaching it. For the passive viewer it is a sculptural assemblage, while for the more active viewer it becomes an interactive artwork intended for play and collaboration. The many possibilities for engaging with City Lights Orchestra reveal the work’s true form as a sculpture-in-the-making, an ongoing composition performed in both structure and sound. 

PLATFORM is a series of one-person commissioned projects by early- and mid-career artists from New England, national, and international art communities that engage with deCordova’s unique landscape. The PLATFORM series lets artists expand their practice and visitors experience new approaches to contemporary sculpture

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.