Courtesy of parapet/REAL HUMANS
A photograph of one of painter Jacob Kassay's pieces for parapet's September 2015 show.
“It’s kind of like building a roller coaster.” That’s how Amy Granat described Stars Way Out, her 2011 installation at White Flag Projects and her first solo show in St. Louis. In a darkened room, she rigged up projectors that looped her 16mm scratch films, which White Flag’s Matt Strauss describes as “Expressionist paintings that move.”
At the time, Granat still lived in New York and showed a lot in Europe; she’s still making work and traveling, but in the winter of 2014 she moved back home to St. Louis after two decades on the East Coast. She’s shifted into more of a curatorial role with parapet/REAL HUMANS, a project co-founded with Berlin-based Annina Herzer. Parapet is the St. Louis arm, housed in the former Free Paarking storefront in South City, where exhibitions and events are held. The first exhibit, which opened September 12, featured work by L.A. painter Jacob Kassay, who showed beautiful glass wedges placed in the pages of library books—a kind of hybrid between sculpture and text piece.
“It was important that the storefront be in St. Louis,” Granat says. “We wanted to deal with things on a very human scale. It’s a small place, where you look at just a few works at a time, or in steps. It’s organized so that you come in by appointment.” By contrast, REAL HUMANS floats—it’s “all basically virtual,” Granat says. “Annina and I are communicating by Skype, by phone, and by text. We wanted to speak to that contradiction right now in the art world—all artists and art shows are so migratory.” That’s because the gallery model has faded in favor of the art fair, whether it’s Art Basel, Frieze New York, or Contemporary Istanbul. “Once you’re at a certain level,” she says, “you’re circulating in this small world, but in that world, you are landing in different cities every week. It’s nomadic.” REAL HUMANS mirrors that, with projects conceived, sourced, and exhibited between Berlin, Paris, and Zurich, but materiality is important to anchor it. “That’s part of the idea with REAL HUMANS,” Granat says. “There will be a record, or a book, or a T-shirt, things of that nature, made in limited release.”
Real humans (literal ones) are a necessary component for parapet as well. “All the artists must come to town,” she says. “They have to be here—that’s part of the deal.” Kassay, for example, custom-made those prisms to be wedged into books borrowed from the U. City Library. Now on view are works by Arizona-based Swiss artist Olivier Mosset, who last exhibited in St. Louis in 2008 at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. “I’m really playing with the form, and experimenting a little bit to see how I can really utilize their presence,” Granat says, adding that she hopes to help people connect with artists beyond the usual wine reception small talk. “It’s about being present, about physically being there,” she says. “It’s about making a space for conversation, for looking, for thinking.”
And that’s where the word “parapet” comes in: It refers to a wall around a balcony, or an earthen barrier that protects soldiers from bullets—a place of great intensity that also offers shelter. “Conceptually, I like that idea,” Granat says. “It’s this little border that’s on the very edge of something.”
parapet/REAL HUMANS is located at 2901 Sidney. For more information, go to parapetrealhumans.com.
