New Media Series: Amy Granat

Saint Louis Art Museum presents Cars, Trees, Houses, Beaches, a 2011 work by St. Louis-based multimedia artist Amy Granat, as the latest installment of the New Media Series. 

Shot in silent 16 mm film over the course of two years, Cars, Trees, Houses, Beaches, juxtaposes shots of Hawaiian beaches, American muscle cars, and the 1950s modernist architectural spaces of the Eames Case Study House in Pacific Palisades, California and the Russell and Ruth Goetz Kraus house in Kirkwood, Missouri, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The different images flow next to each other, shifting between subjects rather than following a linear narrative. Instead, the viewer is drawn into the film’s loops and cycles, which create a lyrical meditation on landscape, modernism, and the American dream. 

Indebted to the legacies of experimental and avant-garde structural film from the 1960s and 1970s, Granat has developed a distinct visual language. The artist distinguishes herself by setting aside materialist concerns to engage with the full poetic capacity of the moving image—evaluating film as a technology, a narrative form, and a physical object. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website