PURCHASE, NY.- Throughout her career, artist Renée Green has created provocative installation pieces, often commenting on the history of gender and race relations in the United States. Using irony and humor, she produces a complex network of associations, while raising challenging questions and prompting viewers to do the same.

In the exhibition Renée Green: Wavelinks, 1999-2002, on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art | Purchase College through January 21, 2007, is Green’s video-installation series that explores the different interactions people have with sound—electronic sound and music, in particular. Using many sources of original and sampled film footage as well as her own interviews with individuals who produce, write about, and listen to music, she weaves her commentary about the power of manipulated sound on listeners at the conscious and unconscious level.

The seven videos, located in a series of simple, generic display units, sample ideas about electronic music, cultural theory, and media and communication in a complex examination of overlapping themes. They include Into the Machine: Laptops, an investigation of computer music; The Aural and The Visual, which probes the relationship between visual and auditory experience in the history of art and criticism; Activism + Sound, an illustration of the various ways sound is used to prop up and undermine political regimes; Spectrums of Sound, a description of the visceral impact of different types of sound; and A Different Reality, which elaborates strategies for creating alternative realities through soundscaping.

Green asks us to consider, How is aural attention managed, and How is this process disrupted? What are the limits of aural perception, and How we are affected by sound, both artificial and natural? How do we react physically and emotionally to sound and images? Each of the video installations combines factual historical information with fictional narrative elements to paint a broad picture of the aural aesthetic experience.

“As the nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer observed, unlike the visual and other performing arts, music does not directly reproduce some aspect of the world; instead, it can move the listener without the mediation of imagery,” says Thom Collins, Director of the Neuberger Museum of Art and curator of this show. “The environments presented here offer audiences an opportunity both to experience and to reflect upon this power as it has been mobilized in meditation, political persuasion, and a host of other important cultural practices.”

Green’s exhibitions, videos and films have been seen in one-person exhibitions at Portikus, Frankfurt; Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Other venues have included Documenta XI, Kassel; Johannesburg Biennial; Baltimore Museum of Art; Kwangju Biennial; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Venice Biennale; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. She has contributed to Texte zur Kunst, Spex, October, Frieze and Flash Art. Her books include Between and Including (Secession, Vienna, 2001); Shadows and Signals (Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, 2000), Certain Miscellanies (DAAD, Berlin, 1996), After the Ten Thousand Things (Stroom, The Hague, 1994), and World Tour (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1993). She is currently Dean of Graduate Studies at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Wavelinks comes from the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art, acquired with funds from the Frederick R. Weisman Contemporary Art Fund.

The Neuberger Museum of Art has planned the following program in conjunction with the exhibition. On Wednesday, December 13, at 12 noon, there will be a docent-led tour of the exhibition as part of the “Art Sandwiched-In” series. The tour and talk are free with museum admission; seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. (Free to Purchase College faculty, staff, and students.)