THE HOUSE
Group Exhibitions, Curated by Jessica Gaddis
July 27 - August 15, 2019
Matthewis Persen House Museum
Kingston, NY
Installed at the Matthewis Persen House Museum in Kingston, NY, these works use written text as material for constructing three-dimensional forms that interrupt the house's built architecture. Formails, are free-standing ritual screens made from near-daily postcard correspondence between Julia Rooney and her sister, poet Anne Marie Rooney. The screens can be rearranged according to the space they are in and are translucent, allowing light to pass through them.
Morningarb is made from pages of the artist's morning journals, which she has been keeping since 2013. The pages—cut up and then “quilted together”—are not legible as prose, and yet are still recognizable as writing. Making and arranging these structures in various spaces, Rooney proposes a way of fluidly intervening within a given architecture: an alternative way of navigating its contours, negotiating one’s behavior in it, and establishing a personal/private space within an otherwise communal/public one.
