Renée Green: Sigetics

...the rhetorical strategy of sigetics, which involves evoking something through its absence.... Elizabeth Dee is pleased to present the gallery's first exhibition with Renée Green. After two massive survey exhibitions, in Europe (Ongoing Becomings, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne,... Read more

…the rhetorical strategy of sigetics, which involves evoking something through its absence….

Elizabeth Dee is pleased to present the gallery’s first exhibition with Renée Green.

After two massive survey exhibitions, in Europe (Ongoing Becomings, Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, 2009) and in the United States (Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2010), Renée Green’s Sigetics brings to New York audiences a selective body of new works, and new reconfigurations.

One of the aspects eluded through their absence are the impossibilities faced when trying to convey the vast corpus of Green’s oeuvre and the phenomenological experiences that her immersive environments provide via sound, spatial arrangements, moving images, color and thought. In this exhibition, these attempts at translation take the form of a compressed, but conceptually expansive, presentation.

Endless Dreams and Water Between (2009), Green’s extensive exhibition commissioned by the British National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, is premiered in New York in its three-channel film installation form, and as a new series of prints. The film installation epicenter resides in Endless Dreams and Water Between, a feature film with four fictitious characters sustaining an epistolary exchange in which their “planetary thought” is weaved with the physical locations they inhabit, visual and aural characters in themselves: the island of Manhattan, the island of Majorca, in Spain, and the islands and peninsula that form the San Francisco Bay Area. The characters reflections and dreams enact what could be described as “an archipelagic mind,” linking worlds, time, and space. This film’s stream of sounds, images, and thoughts contrapuntally intersect the two silent films, Stills and Excess; the former is a film of related still images taken from the different international shooting locations, interrupted by a phrase alluding to the paradoxical processes of photography and memory noted by Henri Bergson; the latter film presents a reflection on structuralist film, as a mixed homage and further rumination on avant-garde film aspirations. In this combinatory projection space, the perceiver’s attention splits and circulates, allowing water-thought forms of world-perception to emerge.

A new series of prints produced for Sigetics provide an elaboration on the Endless Dreams and Water Between constellation: a cast of characters and their colorful thoughts, a compressed textual presentation of the feature film, and a proposal for the material emergence of the ‘momentary nexus’ that constitutes The September Institute, a non-utopian vortex of thinkers, creators, and artists that gather each September in the island of Majorca. One of their mottos states: “We still own our words and can produce them.”

Migration of forms and color, what these can symbolize and how meanings can be reassigned, as well as how migrations of symbols can be thought in relation to people, places, time, histories, creations, and actions, is a threading link between this set of prints and the rest of this new series: a pixelated computer icon that first appeared as a CD-ROM navigational tool in Green’s 1996’s Digital Import/Export Funk Office transmutes and digitally “upgrades” itself in different prints, to fix itself as an ephemeral and monumental wall painting which frames Early Videos (2010): a new installation of Green’s early video work that includes materials from the rarely seen Import/Export Funk Office (1992-1993) and other early videos. Early Videos makes available these seminal materials, and continues the artist’s exploration in forms of presentation, reconfiguration, and rarely encountered thought-distribution, all combined with a reflection on technology cycles, fast-paced obsolescence, and its decisive influence in the shaping of cultural forms, as well as in their international transmission and translation.

Symbolic color, technology and international diasporic cultural transfers intertwine in the sculptural configuration, Relations (2010). A portable digital device presents a short video featuring the mediated voice and image of Green’s brother, lead-singer of Brazilian death-metal band, Sepultura. The video, Megahertz, Megastar, Brother, Brazil (2000) is combined with two large banners alluding to the complexity of aesthetic and historical combination over time, yet to be imagined in conjunction.

Incomplete Acknowledgments (2010), continues this probe into the dialogic nature constitutive of creative cross-fertilization, as a partial index of participants in Green’s video and film work is rendered concrete as a large scale banner. The ongoing incompleteness referred to in this banner is made evident in the last work presented in the gallery, Animation Activation (Sigetics Vortex) (2011). A manuscript, a banner and a portable device containing digital remnants of the multiple private and public activities that combined to create Green’s 2010 exhibition Endless Dreams and Water Between, allow the interested perceiver to test the sigetical limits, enactions and possibilities opened by Green’s ongoing formal and conceptual operations in New York and around the world.

Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker, and writer. A survey exhibition of 20 years of her work was organized in 2009 by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (Ongoing Becomings 1989-2009, JRP/Ringier, 2009) and another exhibition highlighting her time-based work of that period in 2010 by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, YBCA via DAP, 2010). In 2008 the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris organized a retrospective of her films. Selected solo exhibitions venues include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; De Appel Foundation, Amsterdam; Vienna Secession; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati & the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London; her work has been included in many group exhibitions; some venues include Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MACBA, Barcelona; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris & International Center of Photography, New York; her work has also been present at the Whitney, Venice, Johannesburg, Kwangju, Berlin, Sevilla and Istanbul Biennials, as well as in Documenta 11. Her books include: World Tour (1993), Camino Road (1994), After the Ten Thousand Things (1994), Certain Miscellanies: Some Documents (1996), Shadows and Signals/Sombras y señales (2000), Between and Including (2001), Negotiations in the Contact Zone/Negociaçôes na zona de contacto(ed.)2003, She has published essays in Transition, October, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Spex, Sarai Reader, and Collapse among other magazines and journals.

For more information, please contact the gallery at +1 212 924 7545.