Press Release
Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams is the largest US presentation of time-based work in fifteen years by internationally renowned artist Renée Green. A San Francisco-based artist, Green creates works of art that critically assess the intersection of ideas, processes and creativities around a range of topics including contemporary culture, history, transnational travel, dislocation and migration, as well as feminism and biography.
This exhibition presents two large and complex installations and related new works that together offer audiences a chance to view many of the major works produced throughout her exceptional career.
Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009), a commission from the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, UK, makes its US premier at YBCA. Based on a script written by the artist and connected to a memoir written by French novelist George Sand, the installation includes banners with “space poems,” audio works, a feature length experimental film, three short films and printed ephemera.
United Space of Conditioned Becoming (2007) allows visitors to perceptually travel to Berlin, Los Angeles, Kent State University, Kwangju, Barcelona, Lisbon and Naples at different historical times dating from the 19th through the 21st Centuries. The installation explores passages of time, various lacuna, locations and forms of living via a selection of films, videos, websites, sound works and live events produced over a 15-year span.
New features in this exhibition include a work where audiences can listen to texts read aloud from Green’s writings. In the evening, visitors can view outdoor projections of several video works.
New York Times Review
ART IN REVIEW; Renee Green
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: March 31, 2000
Pat Hearn Gallery
In her latest gallery show in New York, Renee Green once more confronts the viewer with masses of information, but conveys it by film and video instead of her usual, rather daunting amounts of reading material—raising its accessibility and pleasure quotient substantially.
Included are ‘‘Wavelinks,’’ a two-monitor video-in-progress about electronic music in Spain whose documentary style contrasts with two impressionistic, elaborately spliced films projected (in alternation) on the wall. One is ‘‘Some Chance Operations,’’ which combines the story of a forgotten Neapolitan filmmaker with interviews with Austrians about Naples.
The other, ‘‘Partially Buried Continued,’’ moves between the artist’s childhood as an Army brat in Korea; Robert Smithson’s Earthwork ‘‘Partially Buried,’’ which he created at Kent State a few days before the 1970 shootings by the National Guard; and the 1980 student uprising in Kwangju, South Korea, which ended with the massacre of 288 demonstrators. In a particularly affecting passage, Ms. Green films a Korean photographer who pages through a book of her pictures of the event while she talks about how few people remember it or its victims. Elsewhere one can listen on earphones to the soundtracks of the two films, out of sync.
The darkened gallery becomes a surround of still and moving images, different sounds and languages and above all shifting mental spaces; entering them, one glimpses individuals contributing to, acting against and lost within the flux of history, both cultural and political. Ms. Green remains something of a harsh taskmaster, but both beauty and humor seem to be on the rise in her work and her thought-provoking latter-day Situationism has never seemed so user-friendly. ROBERTA SMITH
