JULIA ROONEY is a multidisciplinary artist, born and raised in New York City.
To schedule a studio visit or discuss a project, please reach out to juliarooneystudio@gmail.com. Or, find her at @SomeHighTide.
JULIA ROONEY (b. 1989, New York, NY)
Sensitive to the increasing power that digital, virtual, and augmented realities command, Julia Rooney creates paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Rooney’s paintings reference specific technological structures that have come to condition how and what we see, including framing devices, webs, windows, pixilation, algorithms and QR codes. Working at radically different scales, she mimics the way online spaces often juxtapose the micro with the macro, distorting one’s sense of reality. She creates built-up and tactile surfaces—sometimes by cannibalizing old canvases and stitching them back together—countering the way screens flatten the texture of our world. These stitched-together passages conjure up the constructed architecture of our digital world, one built by humans and sustained by their data, even as this architecture often goes unexamined in our daily use of it.
Rooney’s recent solo and two-person shows include In the weather of it (2024, Below Grand, New York, NY), Blueprint (2023, Band of Vices, Los Angeles, CA), Album (2023, Freight+Volume, New York, NY), Screen Shot (2022, Jennifer Terzian, Litchfield, CT), @SomeHighTide (2021, Arts+Leisure, New York, NY), and paper paper (2019, Kopeikin, Los Angeles, CA). She has participated in group shows at Hesse Flatow, Below Grand, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Diane Rosenstein, Artspace, and The Painting Center, among others. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies through The Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans, LA), Yale University Art Gallery (New Haven, CT), The Studios at MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), The Rema Hort Mann Foundation's Artist Community Engagement program (New York, NY), More Art (New York, NY), The Yale Prison Education Initiative (New Haven, CT), and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's SU-CASA program (New York, NY). Rooney received her BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art.