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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.

CALL/VoCA TALK:

A Panel Discussion with Legacy Specialists

This panel discussion featured artist-archivists Antonia Perez, Julia Rooney, and Rose Nestler in conversation with Metropolitan Museum of Art Sculpture Conservator Kendra Roth. The program explored each artist’s own work, and how the artist’s voice can play a role in shaping their legacy.​

 

This event was part of the fourth season of the ongoing CALL/VoCA Talks series, hosted by Pratt Institute in partnership with the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Creating a Living Legacy (CALL) Program. These programs aim to highlight the innovative CALL initiative while also underscoring the crucial need for dialogue with artists around the production, presentation, and preservation of their work.

"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

CRITICISM + VALUE IX

Criticism + Value is a discussion series about the criticism and value of art through a series of intimate conversations about the work and practice of national and international artists. The series continues with a conversation between host Ernest A. Bryant III, L.P.I., and American artist, Julia Rooney on the event of her exhibition at Freight +Volume gallery, Album

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."

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."

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."

FOOTNOTES AND OTHER EMBEDDED STORIES

Four of the five artists from New Haven Artspace's exhibition Footnotes and Other Embedded Stories join Valerie Richardson for an hour-long discussion on WPKN to discuss their work through the Happy and Bob Doran Artists-in-Residence program, co-sponsored by Artspace New Haven and The Yale University Art Gallery.

JULIA ROONEY & SARA STERN IN CONVERSATION

Continuing their tradition of interviewing each other, the two artists discuss the medium of painting and its many lives; artistic research and source material; installation; and the pervasive influence of social media. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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. 

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

IN THE STUDIO:  JULIA ROONEY

This interview was filmed at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, (November 2022) during Rooney's time as a Fall/Winter 2022 Artist-in-Residence.

Sensitive to the increasing power that digital, virtual, and augmented realities command, I create site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. My paperworks and paintings have tactile and built-up surfaces, countering the way screens flatten the texture of our world. Those which are suspended like curtains, slip between being 2D and 3D structures, further resisting their capture by digital means and implicating the viewer’s body as they move around and between them. While my imagery is abstract, I reference specific technological structures that have come to condition how and what we see, including framing devices, windows, “the cloud,” scrolling, pixilation, and tiles the size of laptops and phones. I use materials that hold singular and analog histories of place and time—newspapers, discarded fabric, printed matter—as both a source and an actual component in the work. For the latter, I cannibalize these materials into new forms through the labor-intensive processes of pulpifying, pouring, molding, collaging, stitching, pigmenting, and painting. The resulting works are embedded with my touch and my body. As I then embed them in real space, the changing conditions of light, airflow, sound, and human movement activate them further. It is in this dynamic interplay between my own embodied making process, the site’s conditions, and the viewers’ physical encounter with them, that my work breathes.

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