Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Water Between

Exhibition: 22 January – 21 April 2009

Exhibition preview: 21 January 2009

Renee Green. Endless Dreams and Water Between, 2008. Courtesy of Free Agent Media and Elizabeth Dee Gallery. From the lost world of Atlantis to Thomas Moore’s Utopia, islands loom large in the myths and stories that intersperse western thought. In January 2008, the National Maritime Museum (NMM) opens the first solo UK exhibition of American artist Renée Green. Endless Dreams and Water Between is an exhibition of newly commissioned work which examines how desires and dreams are carried across water and how islands have shaped literature, history and the imagination.

Endless Dream and Water Between has been developed using Green’s own collection of maritime-related films, print and ephemera. Working with footage filmed in Manhattan, Majorca, the islands of the San Francisco Bay northern Californian Pacific Rim and San Francisco itself, Green explores the varied ways cultures conceive of the world. In pursuit of this understanding, the exhibition reveals the power of islands as (imagined places and) locations where people (and their backgrounds) and histories converge and intermingle.

The exhibition combines films, sound, banners and print to examine how the material cultures of maritime history are entwined with desires and dreams. These are carried across the oceans through experience, representation and misrepresentation. Four projected film works follow fictional characters whose curiosity for the islands they inhabit initiates an investigation of the history and movement of people in and around islands.

Renee Green. Endless Dreams and Water Between, 2008. Courtesy of Free Agent Media and Elizabeth Dee Gallery. One character is a Manhattan-based writer, designer and indexer interested in systems of communication; another a writer, herbalist and botanist based in Majorca. Another individual is a writer and marine biologist based in San Francisco Bay. George Sand is another protagonist whose identity extends from the writer of the same name whose works include the 1855 novel A Winter in Majorca.

Through these insular yet contrarily cosmopolitan locations the exhibition explores the systems of knowledge that develop in and around these places, reflecting their sentiments. Various stories emerge, overlap and eventually converge to reveal contrary versions of truth and history.

Three of Green’s previous works, Some Chance Operation (1999) , Designing Living Renée Green (2000) and Elsewhere? (2002) are also being show in the exhibition. Each film investigates operations of chance, distance, tenuous connections and attempts to imagine ideal forms of existence.

Green’s diverse practice introduces alternative ways of interpreting ideas of truth and history, suggesting configurations of what exists in ways not previously imagined. By telling open-ended stories about subjects that range from the 19th-century idea of the Black body through to links between German classical music and American hip hop, Green investigates what has been imagined and invented in our cross-cultural modern society.

Renee Green. Endless Dreams and Water Between, 2008. Courtesy of Free Agent Media and Elizabeth Dee Gallery. Lisa Le Feuvre, NMM’s Curator of Contemporary Art, says: 'Renée Green has consistently returned to ideas of time and the sea throughout her artistic practice. This study of islands explores the complexities of how ideas of place are represented and misrepresented through the sea. Endless Dreams and the Water Between looks at the ways that islands shape our understanding of our place in the world, in the process bringing new ways of understanding our collections and research at NMM.'

Renée Green was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1959. Green’s exhibitions, videos and films have been exhibited throughout the world. Her solo exhibitions include Portikus, Frankfurt (2002), Centro Cultural de Bélem, Lisbon (2000), Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2002) and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1993). She lives and works in New York and San Francisco.

Notes to editors:

• New Visions is the contemporary art programme of the National Maritime Museum. Working with British and international artists, New Visions encourages and broadens access to the arts and deepens NMM’s engagement with its core exploration of the sea, stars and time and to the significance of Greenwich as a World Heritage Site. The Museum is a rich source of inspiration to artists: from the depths of its collections to the magnificent listed buildings. Previous New Visions artists include Tacita Dean, Conrad Shawcross, Faisal Abdu’Allah, Dan Holdsworth, Lawrence Weiner and Simon Patterson. In spring 2009 the New Visions programme will commission a project with the artist Jeremy Millar. The Curator of Contemporary Art is Lisa Le Feuvre.
• The National Maritime Museum – the largest museum of its kind in the world – is housed in impressively modernized historic buildings forming part of the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site. It incorporates the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and 17th-century Queen’s House. The Museum works to illustrate for everyone the importance of the sea, ships, time and the stars and their relationship with people. The Museum welcomes over 1.5 million British and international visitors a year and is also a major centre of education and research. For more information visit www.rmg.co.uk
• This exhibition is funded by Arts Council of England, London.
• Renée Green is represented by Galleria Emi Fontana, Milan and the Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York

For further information or images, please contact:
Nigel Rubenstein
National Maritime Museum Press Office
Tel: 020 8312 6790/6732 | 07903 547 268 or Email: nrubenstein@rmg.co.uk