Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams

Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) announces the largest US presentation of time-based work in fifteen years by internationally renowned artist Renée Green with the exhibition Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams (Feb 20-Jun 20, 2010). The exhibition features two recent large-scale multilayered installation projects as well as selected earlier works with a focus on film, video and sound as central transmitters for explorations in the arts, humanities and sciences that intersect with the artist's personal experiences and research. The currently San Francisco-based artist has been creating works of art for more than 20 years that critically assess the intersection of ideas, processes and creativities around a range of topics including contemporary culture, history, fiction, transnational travel, dislocation, migration and cosmopolitanism, as well as feminism and biography.

Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams focuses on 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. It includes banners with "space poems," audio works, a feature length experimental film, three short films and printed ephemera. Sensations and perceptions are intertwined with various histories, sites and people surrounded by water. The installation unfolds from a script written by the artist containing a series of long, contemplative letters exchanged between four female characters and their engagement with a memoir by French novelist George Sand. It is saturated with images of the sea as well as the Bay Area, Manhattan and Mallorca, locations where the fictional characters live.

United Space of Conditioned Becoming (2007) explores passages of time, various lacuna, locations and forms of living via a selection of films, videos, websites, and live events produced over a 15-year span by Green's (dream) production company Free Agent Media (F.A.H.). Visitors can 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. Featuring over 45 videos and several sound works, it includes Wavelinks (2002), seven videos shot in New York, Vienna, Berlin, Los Angeles and Barcelona that include interviews with composers of electronic music on topics such as activism and sound, laptop music and sound's relationship to pleasure; and Secret comprised of videos, photographs and sound works situated in the famous apartment block in Firminy, France, designed by Le Corbusier.

Other features are a new work where audiences can listen to scripts for various projects, and an outdoor projection viewable in the evenings featuring a trailer of several video works produced by F.A.H.

This exhibition is organized by Betti-Sue Hertz, director of visual arts at YBCA.

In conjunction with the exhibition, a lecture by Renée Green takes place on Fri, Mar 5 from 6-8 pm at YBCA.

Renée Green
Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams