Renée Green, "Endless Dreams and Water Between", details of the installation, 2008.
'Endless Dreams and
Water Between'
is a project by the artist Renée Green, commissioned by the
National Maritime Museum.
The material cultures of maritime history are intertwined with desires
and dreams that are carried across the oceans through experience,
representation, misrepresentation and projections of past and present.
This exhibition pays attention to the varied ways cultures perceive
and conceive of the world. These understandings and perceptions are
developed through struggles for happiness, the imaginary, systems for
comprehension and dreams, as well as by the pursuit of these very
desires. Renée Green has consistently returned to
ideas of time and the sea throughout her
artistic practice. 'Endless Dreams and Water Between'
brings poetics to the ways that
islands shape our understanding of our place in the world by taking us on a journey through the
Mediterranean Sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The exhibition opens with three films meditating on what has been
imagined and enacted in a world of uncertainty. Each investigates
operations of chance, distance, tenuous connection and attempts to
imagine ideal forms of existence. Alongside these, 'Endless Dreams and
Water Between'
draws together four
film projections, sound works, banners, diagrams and drawings.
These varied elements include
traces of several
fictional characters’
reflections upon, and engagement with, islands – sites that are filled
with endless dreams. The islands, which are the focus here, are
Manhattan, Majorca, islands of the
San Francisco
Bay, the northern California Pacific rim and San Francisco itself.
California was thought to be an island by Westerners for centuries – a
misperception based both on its climate and on desires for preferable
futures that became projected on to this imagined island state.
Long histories encompassing geological time and the many migrations
of life over many bodies of water emerge throughout 'Endless Dreams and
Water Between' as Renée Green’s characters follow their various
networks
of interest, instigated by curiosity and physical encounters in the
island locations they inhabit. Every island imagines itself central.
Each of the simultaneously insular and paradoxically cosmopolitan
locations presented in 'Endless Dreams and Water Between' perceive of
themselves in this way. Renée Green is fascinated by the ways that
historical and fictional documents have the ability to reveal contrary
versions of dreams and their trajectories amidst surrounding water. Here
various stories emerge, overlap and eventually converge.
Some of these stories relate water and islands to time and history in
order to frame human actions. Other narratives look to the division of
the world into continents as a question rather than an assertion, in the
process reconsidering geographical concepts that are often taken for
granted.
From the Greeks to the present, generations of Westerners have been
fascinated by islands. Over time, Europeans’ perceptions and concerns
for islands have shifted from seeing them as imaginary spaces to
locations of material and oceanic control – all the while operating as
contested places of perceived potential and escape, as
tabula rasae are
also part of the Western imagination. 'Endless Dreams and Water
Between' intertwines these stories of relationships to water and islands
with fictional accounts of contemporary island inhabitants and
voyagers. Crossing the Mediterranean Sea, Pacific and
Atlantic Oceans, as well as the Hudson River, San
Francisco Bay
and the waters of the Balearic Islands, these journeys point to the
assumptions, understandings and creation of island-ideas and
idea-islands.
(Source: www.rmg.co.uk)
