Prevailing Winds is a site-specific installation that serves as a response to the architecture and history of its location. Previously installed at Fort Mason in San Francisco and Stanford University, at Smack Mellon, the work was installed on a 24-foot-tall wall inside a former boiler house—an industrial space that once bore witness to waves of immigration and the rise and fall of industry in DUMBO.

It gestures toward movement, connection, and change. The paper flutters in response to passing bodies, animated like waves, suggesting motion, loss, and longing. At Smack Mellon, it takes on an organic, vine-like shape, evoking renewal and the entanglements of memory.

On view June 14–July 27, 2025
Curated by Pallavi Surana
Smack Mellon | 92 Plymouth St. Brooklyn, NY 11201

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These seven paintings chart shifting geographies of movement, where migration is not a singular event but an ongoing state of transformation. These works function as temporal portals, drawing from the visions of migrants during their voyages—sun, stars, wind, coasts, and waters—inviting viewers into spaces where past and present blur.

As spaces of convergence, these paintings embrace the instability of perception, allowing meaning to shift with each encounter. Forms emerge and recede, echoing the fragmentary nature of memory and the fluidity of migration. Latitude Unknown lingers with these tensions, inviting viewers to step into the visions of Ren’s paintings—histories both personal and collective that continue to accumulate sedimented meanings with time.