1453 Valencia St. is just an empty storefront painted black, with an eight minute movie running in it. It was made by the photographer Katy Grannan, who has a show going on right now at the Fraenkel Gallery downtown. It runs for the month of February, Wedesday-Sunday, noon to 7p.m.

The film itself is not unlike the lovechild of Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin.

Says Grannan:

We make the leap of faith; and sometimes we willfully create an alternate, perhaps even a delusional reality.  That isn’t limited to California – it’s only limited by our imagination and our circumstances.  My grandmother was the queen of alternate realities, and I think it’s what kept her alive and joyful for a very long time. She wasn’t crazy – she was imaginative and stubborn and, to paraphrase Tony Kushner, ‘Sometimes living in the world can be unbearably ordinary.’

According to the very pleasant man working in the gallery, the sound should be better starting this Wednesday. It was mixed in a carpeting recording studio, and, as it turns out, things sound differently in a huge echoey space.

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H.R. Smith has reported on tech and climate change for Grist, studied at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, and is exceedingly fond of local politics.

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