Julia Rooney

Arts+Leisure is excited to present @SomeHighTide, an exhibition of recent paintings by Julia Rooney.

Comprising a series of two by two-inch paintings, Julia Rooney's exhibition @SomeHighTide queries our intimate relationships with our smartphones and their attendant social networks, with particular regard to the ways such platforms shape our habits of visual consumption and comprehension. By adopting the harsh dimensional constraints of Instagram and similar photo-sharing applications, Rooney acknowledges the ubiquity of the smartphone screen, while her decidedly traditional mediums of oil paint and linen disturbs their veneer of manufactured precision and homogeneity. As hand-wrought effigies of the Instagram photo-square, Rooney’s paintings call attention to the inherent incongruities in superimposing a digital framework over the organic experiences of life and expression.

While the visual arts and society as a whole have had a long dalliance with social media, the marked social isolation and diffuse tragedy of the past year has greatly amplified the role it plays in our lives, with digital interaction and social interfacing gaining currency over concrete "IRL" relationships. However, in the face of Rooney's imperfect squares, their edges distended the stretched from the weight of thick, impasto paint, one becomes aware of the lack native to digital representation, the absence of the unique material presence that @SomeHighTide throws into sharp focus.

A full-color, limited-edition artist book featuring works by Julia Rooney, with essays by Cora Frazier, Ernest A. Bryant, Jeffrey Grunthaner, and Samir Nedzamar, will be available for purchase at the gallery or online.