February 8th: Amy Granat

Whitney

The Kitchen

Nicole Klagsbrun

Amy Granat: Born 1976 in Saint Louis, Missouri; lives in New York, New York.

Ms. Granat received a B.A. in 1998 from Bard College, where she studied film and painting. After moving to New York City, she founded Cinema Zero, a nomadic film and performance series, and collaborated with artists such as Steven Parrino, Jutta Koether, and Richard Aldrich, among many others. Her 16mm films and photographs have been included in exhibitions at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Ullens Center in Beijing, the Shirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, PS1, SculptureCenter, and the 2008 Whitney Biennial in New York City, and had one-person exhibitions at The Kitchen and the New Museum in New York in 2010. She has been teaching at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Education since 2007. Ms. Granat was appointed critic in painting/printmaking at Yale in 2010.

She is best known for her experimental film installations featuring celluloid that has been manipulated by scratching, cutting, or chemical alteration. Her practice though, is wide-ranging, and also includes video, sound, and photography. Granat’s photograms, in which objects are laid on top of film and then exposed to light, are related to her films in terms of her physical approach to image-making. Both of these aspects of her work reveal a fascination with transparency and opacity, and positive and negative space. If Granat’s experimentations with the photogram—a method that emphasizes the intrinsic quality of film, allowing her to “draw” with light—conjures the work of Man Ray in the 1930s, her direct manipulation of film stock is an homage to avant-garde filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage. Non-narrative, Brakhage’s films are abstract compositions with affinities to postwar Abstract Expressionist painting. Granat’s work also recalls that of avant-garde filmmakers such as Hans Richter or Viking Eggeling, both of whom made some of the first light and film experiments in the early part of the twentieth century.