“Stars Way Out” is the name of a closed-down diner that New York-based artist Amy Granat encountered while shooting her latest 16-mm film in the California desert. Although the title and the press release of her first solo show at this gallery refer to specific geographic locations such as Joshua Tree or 29 Palms, the four projections installed in a black room only show an abstract dance of white lines vertically bisecting the black background and circles of light popping up from time to time. While shooting Scratch Films / Stars Way Out (For O.K.), 2006, Granat intentionally overexposed the film, resulting in an entirely black picture; afterward, using a technique adopted by artists like Stan Brakhage, she scratched the filmstrip’s emulsion layer frame by frame. This violent gesture is also present in the sound component, which amplifies both the noise of the film projectors and the act of scratching. In an adjacent room, a single spotlight illuminates ten photographs from 2005 randomly piled in a corner. All titled Stars Way Out Still (For O.K.), these images are enlarged contact prints, here black on white, of the same film frames. The films align with a long tradition of experimental filmmakers, and these works evoke Hans Richter’s and Viking Eggeling’s early-’20s Dadaist experiments and WWII-era Absolute Cinema. Granat suggests visual content through nonfigurative images and succeeds in turning the materiality of a small gesture into an evocative landscape.
