JULIA ROONEY (b. 1989, New York, NY)
Lives and works in New York, NY

Email: juliarooneystudio@gmail.com
IG: @SomeHighTide

Link to C.V.

Julia Rooney makes paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Sensitive to the increasing dominance of a screen-based world, she creates paintings rooted in physicality, even as they playfully contend with the digital screens on which they will inevitably be viewed. Working at radically different scales—from phone-sized miniature paintings to architecturally-sized ones—she mimics the way online spaces often juxtapose the micro with the macro, distorting one’s sense of reality. Her work often references specific technological structures which condition what and how we see: the scale and aspect ratio of screens and apps; the resolution of images when zoomed in or out; QR codes which appear as abstract patterns to the human eye, but can also be read by phones; and most recently, the RGB colorspace of digital monitors. The mechanical way computer systems name image files plays into Rooney’s titles, which often take the form of a prefix (IMG, PIC, OBJ), followed by a number. Other series use language from the poetry of writer, collaborator and sister, Anne Marie Rooney.

Rooney’s recent solo and two-person shows include Tilt (2026, Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT), Feels Like (Queen Projects, Bellingham, WA), Flats (2025, Essex Flowers, New York, NY), 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, (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.