paper (purple)
2018 - 2019
New York, New York
Julia Rooney is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the space between analogue and digital media, gesturing towards a world in which the two tenuously coexist. While rooted in painting, her practice often bridges other disciplines including papermaking and collaborations through the USPS. Her recent solo shows, Screen Shot (Jennifer Terzian Gallery, 2022) and @SomeHighTide (Arts+Leisure, 2021), featured a series of phone-sized and laptop-sized paintings installed both physically at the galleries and digitally on her eponymous Instagram account, which she intermittently reactivates for site-specific projects as an ongoing form of critique and inquiry on social media. She continued this research as a 2021-22 Happy and Bob Doran CT Artist in Residence through Yale University Art Gallery and Artspace New Haven, culminating in the group exhibition Footnotes and other embedded stories. Her ongoing series “paper paper”—made entirely of pulpified and re-formed newspapers—has been exhibited at The Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC, 2021), Real Eyes Gallery (Adams, MA, 2021), and Kopeikin Gallery (Los Angeles, CA, 2019), and is currently on long-term loan at The Nature Conservancy in Connecticut. Rooney received her BA in Visual & Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her MFA in Painting from Yale School of Art.
Joan Mitchell Center Residency, 2022
Deeply concerned with the way our contemporary mediascape is shaping patterns of thinking, I produce paintings and installations that invite viewers to reflect on how 21st-century technologies—from apps like Instagram, to platforms like Zoom—condition what and how we see. My work straddles physical and digital mediums: existing both as objects made in real space, and digital renderings of these objects, shot by computers and phones. Working in this hybrid way, I heighten viewers’ awareness of their own navigation between a three-dimensional reality and its digital counterpart.”