Renée Green, Space Poem #7 (Color Without Objects: Intra-Active May-Words)

Narrator: Adrienne Edwards is one of the curators of the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept. She discusses one of Renée Green’s Space Poems, which are the banners hanging from the ceiling.

Adrienne Edwards: Renée uses very poetic, abstract, sometimes oblique language that sort of functions to open our mind as to how we understand what we think we understand, how we encounter information, because it has almost an advertising kind of sensibility. It’s interesting: that kind of slippage between expecting to be told something as opposed to being presented with the opportunity to think magically in a way about something.

Narrator: Renée Green talked about the series. 

Renée Green: Space Poems are open-ended wavelengths very often in serial forms. I chose it as a way of working because it is so capacious. I’m looking for different kinds of resonances. Each one is different and I’m always collecting ideas for the Space Poems. I would say my work over time is try to find distillations throughout. I’m always trying to do that. And so it would be refining it in a way, almost like a poem.