In the Light of the Afternoon
This multidisciplinary art instillation included a 18 minute short film, four stained glass sconces, and five lino-cut prints.
Central Server Works, Downtown Los Angeles
October 25 - November 22, 2025
In the Light of the Afternoon is a short film [and art installation] by interdisciplinary artist Emily Babette Gross. The film is a hallucinatory meditation on the dissolution of self through dream, archetype, and the uncanny.
Filmed within the hushed corridors of a historic Los Angeles abbey, the work follows The Dreamer—played by Gross herself—as she drifts through three cycles: waking life, dream, and nightmare. Each phase escalates in anxiety and disorientation, unraveling the fragile boundaries between perception and illusion.
Drawing on the legacy of Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and Kenneth Anger’s Rabbit’s Moon (1972), Gross reimagines mid-20th-century experimental cinema for the present moment, unveiling a fractured yet luminous exploration of the multiplicity of selves.
words by Joshua Oduga
