Renée Green’s Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture at Utah Museum of Fine Arts

Renée Green. Partially Buried, 1996. Chibachrome
Renée Green. Partially Buried, 1996. Chibachrome

Artist and Professor Renée Green will deliver the third Holt/Smithson Foundation Annual Lecture at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City on Friday, September 27, 2024. Green will present a talk titled Imagining Contact: Then, When, Now, Here, and will be in conversation with the Holt/Smithson Foundation’s Executive Director, Lisa Le Feuvre.

Renée Green’s expansive installation Partially Buried in Three Parts (1996-1997) began with a reflection on the artist Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried Woodshed (1970), a work primarily known as a photograph and believed to no longer exist. Consisting of Partially Buried (1996), Übertragen/Transfer (1997), and Partially Buried Continued (1997), Green’s multimedia installation grew out of a consid­eration of the year 1970 and the associations became denser in the process of working, becoming a formal and conceptual archaeological endeavor reflecting on the vagaries of memory and historical recall.

Renée Green. Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996-1997. moCa Cleveland, 2022. Installation view. Image: ©FieldStudio
Renée Green. Partially Buried in Three Parts, 1996-1997. moCa Cleveland, 2022. Installation view. Image: ©FieldStudio
Renée Green. Übertragen/Transfer, 1997. KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2021. Installation view. Image: © Frank Sperling

In 2024, Green finds herself thinking about a variety of projects which again intersect with the work and thoughts of Smithson, as well as those of Nancy Holt. At present, she is developing new work for the Foundation’s The Island Project: Point of Departure, for Western Washington University Sculpture Collection, which hosts Holt’s Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings (1977-1978), and for Dia Art Foundation, which is the steward of Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-1976), and Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), both located in Utah.

In considering Holt and Smithson in the present, Green reflects: “As I read, I continue to wonder about that distant time, then, when things happened differently. The traces I find in books stimulate curiosity to further wonder about the places referenced in images, a wish to see what is here, or there, now; I am curious too about what cannot be seen in the images. Questions of both space and place arise. Questions of time also arise. Questions of travel, questions of the environment, built and unbuilt, emerge too as I think and feel, now, here. On earth.”

 

Renée Green. Partially Buried, 1996. Film still
Partially Buried Continued, 1997. Film still

The talk is free of charge and registration is encouraged via this link. The event will be recorded, and available on the websites of the Holt/Smithson Foundation and Utah Museum of Fine Arts. You can watch the livestream here.

More information about the Holt/Smithson Foundation’s Annual Lecture Series.

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