For twenty years Rénee Green’s work has explored connections: between color and knowledge; among global networks (of people, ideas, materials); and between art and its audiences. In this sense, her latest exhibition feels like nothing new. And, in many ways, it is not––“Sigetics” is culled from her two-decade career and two recent surveys thereof. Indeed, the Elizabeth Dee Gallery feels reconfigured here as something of an archive in the process of its own creation, its boldly chromatic banners and framed prints recursively pointing us back to other moments, even as they intoxicate us visually. That said, this exhibition is anything but a rehash. It is more of a remix, combining old works in new ways, presenting new images in dialectic with previous analyses. Many of Green’s rarely seen works reappear on an array of small digital devices, from DVD players to iPhones.
If one does not have time for such an immersion course, the three-channel film Endless Dreams and Water Between, 2009, showcases the complexity and richness of Green’s practice in a single encounter. Originally commissioned by the British Maritime Museum, the film sutures seemingly discrete human narratives and remote islands, collapsing the distances of the oceans between. Endless Dreams oscillates fluidly between analytically dense missives and hypnotically abstract sonic and pictorial landscapes. In many respects, it is the perfect crystallization of the flurry of texts on diaspora and globalization that emerged concurrently with Green’s own work. While her projects sacrifice little of the cognitive sophistication of this implied bibliography, they also add volumes, giving them lived specificity and texture. “Sigetics” is an unconventional, even taxing tour de force that cannot be ignored.
