Still from "Ghostwriter", 2006, Silent 16mm black & white film transferred to DVD
White Flag Projects’ office smells like sawdust and paint; a power drill echoes in the next room. Two rows of old-fashioned film projectors face a blank wall; orange and black electrical cords sneak across the floor, coiling around ladders and skirting a hanging tarp. In short, the space is in a state of minor chaos called “mounting an exhibition.” The exhibition in question is Amy Granat’s, opening next Thursday, September 8, between 6-8 PM.
Amy Granat, a St. Louis native, is known for her experimental 16-milimeter films created in her distinct visual language unified by movement, absence, dissonance, and exploration of the sublime. Granat’s films demonstrate a holistic approach to the total potential of film itself: as a technology, as a narrative form, as a physical object, and fundamentally as a document of activity transmitted through time and light.
Her most well-known films are her “scratch films”, which are exactly what they sound like: camera-less films made by scratching, drawing and punching holes in film stock. Two such earlier films will appear as part of the exhibition, Stars Way Out/White Stars for White Flag (2005/2011) and Ghostrider (2006).
Granat’s interest in motion and longstanding involvement with music, dance and collaboration are represented by two films in which Granat directs her subjects’ improvised movements, Felicia in Zurich (2009), and Lines in the Sand (2009). Both films further develop Granat’s translation of activity into form, articulating unifying conceptual relationships present throughout the artist’s entire oeuvre.
The exhibition will also include Granat’s newest work, Venice Flowers (2011). The most reductive of Granat’s films on view, Venice Flowers explores the artist’s interest in removing her familiar figurative and gestural motifs to investigate more minimal interactions among light, shadow, and projection surface, blurring the relationship between cinema and architecture.
The exhibition will open with a reception from 6-8 PM on Thursday, September 8 and will remain on view until October 22, 2011. For more information on this exhibit and other upcoming events at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.
(Allison Fricke, Intern)