AMY GRANAT

I want all the films I see to be about light….flicker,scratch and wash…the slightest recorded image..one or none…the portrait films of Amy Granat…informed by Structuralist and experimental films of avant-gardes. Filming in a physical, grinding,back and forth…destroying emulsion…ripping silver-hylide surfacing…bathing delluliod in old odd chemicals…just to pass light through. Revealing the process and resulting in the subjectivity of the eye…an acid recollection of ghosts and light and dark and darkness…Destructured film as the post modern equal of of structuralist film…the emotional reflections …"A Midsummer Night's Dream"…

Steven Parrino, 2003

as part of the cat for "The Return of The Creature" Kunstlerhaus Palais Thurn und Taxis, Bregenz Austria

I first saw Amy Granat’s scratched film projections in a group show at Champion Fine

Art, curated by Steven Parrino, and was immediately taken with the simplicity of the

film and the emotional urgency of the moving image and sound. The projectors are

installed in a way that their physical and spatial existence render them sculptural as

they demand a sort of attention that the default TV and a VCR do not. Also, the film

projections have a modularity and mutability in the context of an art exhibition (rather

then say a film screening) in that every film becomes site-specific concerning the

relationship between the film, the space, the lighting, the volume of the sound and

any other artwork in the exhibition. There is also an interestingly incongruous

relationship between the small gesture of scratching the minute film frames paired

with the larger, immediate and in your face projection that results. Additionally the

scratch is made with a physical linearity, from frame to frame, that contrasts with the

projection of the film which possesses a time-based linearity (i.e. one film contains

one long scratch that runs the length of the film, from top to bottom, projected,

however, this translates to a line that floats from the left side to the right and back

again). Furthermore, the slow meditative rotation of the reels and the accompanying

consistent click click inherent to the projector contrast sharply with the dynamic and

sometimes chaotic experience of the film and soundtrack. Beyond all this, and more

importantly, the films possess an amazingly poetic quality in the sometimes frenetic,

sometimes somber movement of the black and white image and the corresponding

hum, pop and screech of the sound (when the film is scratched the actual sound

track that exists along the edge of the image area of the film is scratched as well,

creating a sound that literally reflects/describes the image). These combinations

reference the works of painters such as Franz Kline or Cy Twombly and also the

early scratched film work of Len Lye. The sound exists in a sort of noise tradition that

comes out of the La Monte Young/Velvet Underground and still exists today.

--- Richard Aldrich