Central Server Works is pleased to present In the Light of the Afternoon, Emily Babette Gross’ first solo exhibition with the gallery, following her participation in "Thought Forms" (Paris, 2022). The exhibition features Gross’ new surrealist short film, 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. The film is both homage and rupture. Where Deren constructed a recursive domestic dreamscape and Anger conjured mythic allegories, Gross sets her inquiry within the psychic landscape of contemporary identity—shaped as much by subcultures and queer belonging as by archetypal hauntings. The abbey becomes a site of passage: an architectural threshold where archetype dissolves into persona, and the sacred collapses into nightmare. As the cycles progress, viewers encounter doubling, uncanny repetition, and theatrical gestures of estrangement. Figures shift between familiar and estranged, echoing the anxiety of living in a body that is both one’s own and also an image refracted through culture. Gross’ camera lingers on thresholds—doorways, cloisters, fractured mirrors—suggesting that the self, too, is an architecture under perpetual renovation. "In the Light of the Afternoon" emerged as Gross’ first major art project following her MFA thesis exhibition "Emily_irl" (University of California, Irvine, 2023), where she debuted a multi-channel video alongside architectural installation, astroturf environments, and paintings. That exhibition was her initial foray into filmmaking; here, she builds on its foundations, expanding her visual and conceptual language through collaboration with cinematographer Ino Yang Popper. Realized as an independent co-production between the artist and Central Server Works, the project marks a new stage in the gallery’s role: not only presenting but producing ambitious moving-image works. This model draws on historical precedents of galleries supporting experimental cinema, while signaling the gallery’s evolving commitment to interdisciplinary practices that challenge the limits of medium, exhibition, and collaboration. The themes and methods Gross has developed across her practice—fragmented narratives, material experimentation, the interplay of body and image—resonate throughout the film, translated into a hallucinatory language of light, movement, and sound. Her foundation in drawing and painting remains palpable, shaping the clarity and intensity of the film’s imagery even as it pushes into new cinematic territory. In this way, "In the Light of the Afternoon" crystallizes Gross’s evolution: from painter and sculptor to filmmaker, from static image to moving tableau. The film's score is composed by Chateau Noir, a band composed of Emily Babette Gross and Brent Wyman whose gothic electronic music utilizes live electronic instrumentation.