TIGHT CORNERS at D.D.D.D.
REVIEW BY MACKENZIE KIRKPATRICK
“Julia Rooney’s Bluescreen (fourth edition) establishes artificial corners, as dressing screens or DIY room dividers would. The positioning of the work closes off one section, preventing access to a corner of the room, while creating six others. The five panels of the piece are accorded different levels of transparency, and the rectangular addition and subtractions to the screens recognizably have the scale of an iPhone. In adopting this modular approach to composition, Rooney introduces distinctly digital visual themes into the work, calling attention to the way we frame our own online enclaves while reserving physical space for the imagination.”
IN THE WEATHER OF IT
“A uniquely fruitful collaboration between the artist Julia Rooney and her sister, the poet Anne Marie Rooney, In the weather of it is a multi-layered installation that’s something of an off-key love song to Lower Manhattan, past and present, as well as a self-deprecating but ultimately sincere exploration of what it means to live an artistic life today.”
- Logan Royce-Beitmen, Tussle Magazine, April 4, 2024
JULIA ROONEY BLASTS ART HISTORY’S BLUEPRINT
“The online world in which we live is dominated by digital simulations of dimension which she solidifies in mature meditations on the role of illusionistic space in our century. Her rendering of depth is precise. The sharp relief of punctured planes lets us marvel at her technical skill. The pure abstraction of layered planes avoids the cloying tropes artists use to reveal a mastery of the third dimension.”
-Mat Gleason, Coagula, January 11, 2024
BOOK LAUNCH & ARTIST TALK
On the occasion of the closing for the exhibition Blueprint, join artists Julia Rooney and Matt Saunders for a conversation at The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, 153 Hudson Street
January 16, 2024
6pm Doors
6:30pm Conversation
7:30pm Reception & Book Signing
THE OBLIQUE APPROACH
ESSAY BY YECHEN ZHAO
"Julia Rooney is a painter highly attuned to the ways in which her medium is mediated by twenty-first-century technology, and considers how the old metaphor of painting as a window onto the world interacts with the now common experience of viewing painting through digital screens. With Bluescreen, she expands her investigation of this relation–between painting and mediated experiences thereof––to the analog precedents that sustained it during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her inquiry proceeds by intertwining terminology with technique, with works that incorporate cyanotype and stitchwork to prompt reflection on the metaphors of window and screen that are so deeply embedded in histories of image-making."
-Yechen Zhao, Assistant Curator of Photography and Media, The Art Institute of Chicago
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JULIA ROONEY: ALBUM
REVIEW BY ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST
"Julia Rooney’s show of paintings at Freight+Volume is both strong, and utterly of our Post-Postmodernist moment in that every single artwork in it has been constructed according to a different set of rules. Which is to say that acquiring a signature style, the longtime drive of a working artist, particularly early in their career, is out of the window. Which is just as the artist intended. "
-Anthony Haden-Guest, Whitehot Magazine
"The brush strokes are moving in all directions, but are clearest in the grays."
ESSAY BY LAUREL V. McLAUGHLIN
"Rooney calls the embodied moving back and forth before her paintings, “zooming-in” and “zooming-out,” much like we do with smart phone cameras. In both the creation of a scaled painting and the apprehending of it from either close or afar, we conjure an imaginary that extends beyond the very real object in front of us."
-Laurel V. McLaughlin
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PIXELS, QR CODES AND SQUARE PAINTINGS
INTERVIEW WITH AMANDA MILLET-SORSA
Artist Julia Rooney’s multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, works on paper and installation that explore the tensions between analog and digital media. Her paintings offer both two and three dimensional approaches to abstract image making focusing on the square shape as a foundation. Though digital media in the use of QR codes, pixels, and grids are embedded with rigid right angle squares, Rooney challenges these images with her hand by cutting, sewing, drawing/painting loosely, with thick and thin marks bringing us closer to the analog, to painting, and to what is human.
- Amanda Millet-Sorsa
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KEELY ORGEMAN IN CONVERSATION WITH JULIA ROONEY
Accompanying Rooney's show Screen Shot at Jennifer Terzian Gallery, Rooney and Orgeman discuss the influence digital technology has had on the medium of painting, from the perspective of artist and curator respectively—particularly in the age of social media and through the Covid-19 pandemic.
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INHABITING AN OUT-OF-SCALE WORLD:
INTERVIEW WITH FILIPPO LORENZIN
"Referring to the history of art and the addictive relationship between our bodies and our electronic devices, Rooney suggests an oblique approach to the creation of works of art in the age of social media and new technologies."
-Filippo Lorenzin
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JULIA ROONEY @SOMEHIGHTIDE
REVIEW BY CIGDEM ASATEKIN
"The scale and imperfect edges of Julia Rooney’s paintings at Arts+Leisure are remarkable. Affixed to the window, a handmade, colorfully agitating QR code on a two by two-foot square canvas welcomes the viewer into the gallery. Inside the space, the size of the canvases diminishes, but their impact remains."
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LEVELS OF PERCEPTION:
ESSAY & INTERVIEW WITH ERNEST A. BRYANT III
"At two-by-two inches, the size of the paintings makes explicit the distortion produced when viewing these works in the digital space, a space where, so long as what is presented is meant to be seen by human eyes in the real world, when it’s seen through the oppression of pixels, something is lost."
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WRITE A CAPTION...
ESSAY BY CORA FRAZIER
"Rooney hasn’t absented herself from social media; she’s simply chosen a different position to it, using technology as one of her materials instead of shaping her materials to the demands of technology."
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THE TABERNACLE AS IMAGE
COMMENTARY BY XIAO SITU
"By holding one of her original miniature paintings next to its online double, artist Julia Rooney stresses that although the two are related, they are not one and the same."
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ART AT HOME: A CONVERSATION WITH JULIA ROONEY
Caroline Tisdale speaks with painter Julia Rooney to discuss the exhibition she curated, Open House, and the effects of the pandemic on the art world.
Image by Chanél van der Merwe for Conversation X.
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JULIA ROONEY INTERVIEWED
BY JENNIFER EARTHMAN
In this conversation with Jennifer Earthman, the artist describes the path that led her to abstraction, abstraction’s pervasive history, and its particular relevance today: “In today’s world where the fact/fiction dichotomy is especially fraught, abstraction offers a third option—a way of thinking that does not foreclose thought, at the same time that it does not evade the messiness of debate.” She also discusses her belief in the psychological resonance of color, particularly through certain juxtapositions.
PERSPECTIVES
This episode of the podcast PERSPECTIVES features a conversation between Samuel Shapiro, Julia Rooney and Alteronce Gumby reflecting on the past and present of painterly abstraction.
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TINTAMARRE
Letter Writing as Proposition, the Importance of Touch, and Collaborative Making with
Julia Rooney and Maya Strauss
During the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, painters Julia Rooney and Maya Strauss continue to find ways of staying in touch at a distance by writing letters and sending each other works through the the mail. While graduate students at the Yale School of Art, Julia and Maya began their correspondence on the occasion of a dual critique. During this evaluation, each artist presented her work in a shared critique space, but before jumping into the crit, the artists read a selection of the letters with which each slipped under their studio doors from the past month. This experiment has lead to further correspondences between the artists, allowing each to carve out a contemplative space for meandering within one’s own thoughts. In this conversation, we talk about running/walking, keeping a journal, graduate study, and the importance of touch within painting.
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paper paper
Produced by John Alexander of Crook & Nanny Productions, this trailer introduces Rooney's ongoing project, paper paper. Footage includes installation of the exhibition at Kopeikin Gallery (Spring 2019); a conversation with John Walsh, former Director of the Getty Museum; and a public papermaking workshop held at the Art & Social Activism Festival (Fall 2019) organized by Nicholas Cohn.
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REMAP: A Community Project by
Anna Adler, Corinne Cappelletti and Julia Rooney
REMAP was a collaborative project involving meditation, recipe sharing, and map-making with homeless and formerly homeless community groups. Facilitated by artists Anna Adler, Julia Rooney, and Corinne Cappelletti (alumni of the 2014 Engaging Artist Residency) and funded by a seed grant from More Art, REMAP consisted of workshops held July through December 2015. REMAP aimed to trace the often invisible journeys and stories of transient populations in NYC through visual art, movement, and cooking. The goal was to generate a creative dialogue and exchange between the homeless and the homed through the process of mapping. This Open Session was held at Jefferson Market Library in New York City, December 2015.
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