FOOTNOTES
and other embedded stories
group exhibition, curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin
April 30 - June 25, 2022
Artspace, New Haven, CT
Footnotes and other embedded stories takes its point of departure from the tiny number that leads to an adjacent text at the bottom of a page. Within research, a footnote acts as a hypertext—disclosing a source, highlighting a reference, tracing a line from thought to thought. Outside of academic contexts they arise in conversational tangents, offering readers, viewers, speakers, and thinkers the opportunity to delve deeper, to embed themselves within the root of the text.
Exhibited artists: Leonard Galmon, Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez, Allison Minto, Julia Rooney, and Joseph Smolinski
Greenscreen is an installation consisting of a freestanding six-by-six-foot painting upheld by found cast-iron bench legs, which casts a shadow on two-by-two-inch paintings mounted on a nearby wall.
The large canvas, painted with chroma key green, references the greenscreen, a cinematic tool in which objects and people have the ability to enter digital realms other than the present through the camera’s non-registration of that color. The smaller painted canvases featuring a naturalistic range of greens cite historic landscape paintings from Yale University Art Gallery’s collection and, by extension, the traditional notion that paintings offer windows to the world optically. Repainting only two-by-two-inch excerpts of the original paintings, Rooney nods to the scale and quality with which we now view art on our phones through apps like Instagram, inviting us to consider: What and how are we seeing through these digital devices?
