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Multimedia artist Renée Green has designed three new site-specific artworks in her Space Poems series to be installed at three locations on Western’s campus beginning the week of May 27.

In describing her Space Poems, a series of suspended banner installations, artist, writer, and filmmaker Green says, “Space Poems are open-ended and capacious; in them, it’s possible for me to retrieve many things. Existing in a variety of spaces, Space Poems allow room for combining fragments of encounters, of diverse kinds.” They are designed to be visually animated as a viewer extracts meaning while moving through space. 

Green is known for her highly layered and formally complex multimedia installations in which ideas, perception, and experience are examined from myriad perspectives.

The skybridge between Academic East and West will feature a suspended banner installation, and the main lobby of the Interdisciplinary Science Building will feature double-sided porcelain enamel plates. An installation of double-sided glass windows at the Western Gallery will be added later. 

According to Green, “These sites were chosen to create a meandering path among specific works in the current Campus Sculpture Collection that resonate with my intellectual and aesthetic interests and trajectory.” The work will be installed indoors but will also, importantly, be publicly visible outdoors. 

Green conceives of the exhibition as a “dispersed, yet connecting Space Poem constellation" and notes that her thinking about the constellation “continues to revolve around two terms: ‘Geopiety,’ a term used by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, and ‘Survivance,’ a term used by scholar Gerald Vizenor.” 

The Western exhibition was created at the invitation of the Washington State Arts Commission. The commission and installations are funded from a portion of the state capital funding dedicated to the arts from the recently completed Kaiser Borsari building on campus.

Green’s exhibitions, videos and films have appeared in museums, institutions, biennales, and festivals throughout the world. She is a professor at the Art, Culture, and Technology program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture & Planning. Her most recent books include “Inevitable Distances,” “Pacing,” and “Other Planes of There: Selected Writings.”

The artist expects to visit campus in October to engage with the Western community around her works of art.