In the weather of it

Julia Rooney and Anne Marie Rooney

March 2-

PRESS RELEASE

Curatorial Statement

A conversation between painting and poetry and two sisters is now on view on Orchard Street at Below Grand.

Can a painting start with a frame and then become a window? Gilded, wooden, metal, plastic—all found as remnants of strangers’ lives, in an antique store or salvaged from the street. What pasts did these frames hold? Does the canvas stretched within, layered in oils and pigments, facilitate the massaging out of an image — of its body, of its memory? The ensuing glow started its life in the world at first unnamed, then named, after lines from a poem. What to do with those bits of poetry left behind, perhaps to be stitched and re-stitched on a cold winter day? What's glue and what's gift? A mountain of crumb.

-Excerpt from "Abstraction" by Anne Marie Rooney, previously published in Conjunctions.

The smell of history is inhaled from browsing flat files, gray, and beige archival boxes containing images from another time. What does it mean when you have inhabited a city as a home, where your street and its neighboring buildings are unrecognizable from images uncovered in an archive? As children, the Rooney sisters visited the New York Historical Society. Twenty years later, they now searched its archive for images. Using these images as navigation points, the sisters draw out a path—a constellation of their city, in Lower Manhattan.

Today, they embark on a walk around the neighborhood of their youth. One films, while the other holds her painting—a V-shaped roof over walking legs. They know some corners are not eternal, the turns are sharp, acute, and obtuse, with the occasional large black trash bags and discarded objects, some of the daily 10,000 tons of collective litter. Some brick and stone buildings remain as they were a hundred years ago, other streets have been subject to new growths mostly in glass and steel. Manholes still cover the streets, and steam still rises. You hear the deep sound of muffled cymbals at the back of an orchestra when a car rolls across those thick steel plates laid on tarmac, the presence of ongoing construction. We see that children still write with chalk, hearing those jerky staccato marks grazing the sidewalk, as they learn to write their names, to draw a star, a square, a heart.

Though we continue to accept a lifetime lived on a screen—a glowing surface not too far from reach, accelerating our correspondence, communication, connectedness, efficiency, addiction, perfection, loneliness—There are also scraps of paper blown by the wind, waiting to be reused, rescued, perhaps by you, and if you see one landing on such a steel plate, you might be enticed to stay and read it.

- Amanda Millet-Sorsa

Julia Rooney (born 1989, New York, NY) is a visual artist based in New York, NY and New Haven, CT. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Band of Vices (Los Angeles, CA), Freight+Volume (New York, NY), Jennifer Terzian (Litchfield, CT), Arts+Leisure (New York, NY) and Kopeikin (Los Angeles, CA). She has had residencies and fellowships through The Joan Mitchell Center, Yale University Art Gallery, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, More Art, The Studios at MASS MoCA, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, amidst others. //

Anne Marie Rooney (born 1985, New York, NY) is a poet and artist living in Baltimore. She is the author of No Beautiful (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2018) and Spitshine (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012), as well as two chapbooks. Her poetry has been twice featured in the Best American Poetry anthology, and has been the recipient of the Iowa Review Award, the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, the Amy Award, the Freund Prize, and others. With the artist and game designer Sam Sheffield, she creates poetic games as LORRAINE.

Since 2011, the Rooney sisters have been using the U.S. Postal System as a medium and a site for collaboration, production, and distribution of visual and text-based work. Their shared practice reclaims the unwieldy histories often held in found objects, texts, and images, transforming them into new works. In 2022, they were awarded residencies at Soaring Gardens Artist Retreat, where they shared a studio and produced much of the work displayed at Below Grand. Walking inside the wedge like a leaf or a clock turning back was filmed in early 2024. In it, Anne Marie documents Julia walking her painting, Bluescreen, from their childhood home to Below Grand Gallery and back. The route of the 3.5-mile walk was mapped out in advance, determined by images the Rooney sisters researched in The New York Historical Society’s archive. These images appear intermittently throughout the film, inserted in place of Bluescreen as it moves through the present-day reality of these streets.