3/3/2000
Renée Green
Pat Hearn Gallery, New York
This exhibition will present the US premiere of Renee Green's most recent video-film "Some Chance Operations" '99; this work, which uses silent film as a format for investigating memory, was shown recently as part of Green's solo exhibitions at the Vienna Secession and the Fundació Antoni Tà pies in Barcelona (through March 26). Inaddition this show will feature two other new works: the video-film "Partially Buried Continued" and "WaveLinks," a work in progress tha tincludes a video-film and a CD
All these projects relate to what Green calls "cultural translation," that is, how we negotiate cultural differences based on time, distance, and visual perception. Green addresses these issues through theinternational mass media of arinternational mass media of art, film, and music, looking especially at the structures of projection, identification, imagining, and fictional narrative.
In this exhibition, Green raises a multitude of challenging questionsand prompts the viewer to do the same. Some Chance Operations.Shot in Naples, Vienna, and New York, "Some Chance Operationexplores the notion of the archive--in this instance, film--as an unstablereceptacle for memory. In particular, "Some Chance Operations"focuses on the work of Italian filmmaker Elvira Notari (1875-1946), who produced over sixty feature films between 1906 to 1930, only three of which survive intact. The loss of most of Notari's films provides thecentral metaphor for Green's work. Green ponders how history copes
with such omissions.
Dreaming and projection are two ways individuals attempt toreconstruct or recount familiar details, and memories are constituted largely through specific words, sounds, sensations, or images. In this case, the city of Naples, Notari's city, is a basis for the meditation. By following the traces of a lost Notari film, Green asks the viewer to consider what memory and loss. The project consists of an installation, a CD are at hand for coping with the uncertainties of video-film; in this exhibition the CD and video-film will be shown.
In 1996, Green presented her previous show at the Pat Hearn Gallery titled "Partially Buried." That show used Robert Smithson's now-lost "Partially Buried Woodshed" (1970) at Kent State University to investigate notions of loss, transience, location and dislocation, and investigate notions of loss, transience, location and dislocation, and the passage of time.
These themes were renewed in the installation"Partially Buried in Three Parts," presented at the Kwangju Biennale in Korea in 1997.
For this exhibition, Green will present the third component of this ongoing work, which employs photography toanalyze questions of history, distance, and identity. Central to this video-film are photojournalistic images of the Korean War, which the artist saw as a child, juxtaposed with photographs taken by journalists in Kwangju in 1980 and by Green in 1997. Green also explores in this work issues of family and genealogy as she looks at her own relatives and key artistic forebears, in this case, Robert Smithson and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
During a series of visits to Barcelona during 1999, Green began work on "WaveLinks," a multiform work now in progress. This exhibition wil linclude "WaveLinks" (2000) and "WaveLinks Raw" (2000), two videos which run simultaneously and indicate directions that will be explored further in the final work The multimedium aspect of the project allow
Green to raise critical questions about many types of perception. She further in the final work The multimedium aspect of the project allows asks, for example, how does sound circulate amid other forms of circulation? How is aural attention managed, and how is this process disrupted? What are the limits of aural perception, and how we are affected by sound outside of us and in our heads and bodies? Finally, how are our physical, emotional, and intellectual relations to sound and images constituted.
Continuing the multiform-unititled method used in her "Digital Import/Export Funk Office" (installation and CD-ROM, 1993), "Partially Buried" (video and CD track, 1996), and "Some Chance Operations"
(video and CD, 1999), Green continues to examine the temporal, spatial, sensual, and linguistic implications of circuit relations.. She relates these issues not only to psychosocial questions of presence and absence but also to larger political topic of "globalism and its discontents." "WaveLinks" references physical locations including Barcelona, Geneva, Vienna, Detroit, and New York. Here are some of the frequencies to tune into in this work: scary sounds, sounds of love, sounds of resistance, varieties of information, they ways sounds can caress and save one's life, the possibilities opened when transmitting to unknown receivers, the power of individual voices, the overwhelming sea of language, and, finally, what's lost in translation.
Pat Hearn Gallery 530 W.22nd St. NYC
tel: (212) 727-7366 fax: (212) 727-74674