Julia Rooney

IMG_0704, 2020

Oil on canvas

2 x 2 in (5.08 x 5.08 cm)

Completed in 2020, Julia Rooney’s IMG_0704 measures just two inches square—precisely the footprint of an Instagram thumbnail—yet it condenses the ambitions of a much larger canvas. The title, borrowed from a smartphone auto-filename, signals her ongoing interrogation of how digital conventions infiltrate studio practice. By staging a painting at the scale of a screen icon, Rooney invites us to weigh the tactile slowness of oil against the friction-free velocity of the feed, asking what is gained, and what is lost, when visual experience is miniaturized for perpetual scrolling.

Up close, the object reveals a surprisingly sculptural presence. A graphite-toned border, roughly extruded along the stretcher’s edge, frames nested bands of vermilion, charcoal, and slate-blue. Inside this compressed proscenium, lilac and ultramarine rectangles interlock with lozenge-shaped whites, their brushstrokes laid on thick enough to catch raking light. The whole surface reads less as a flat image than as a relief tile: paint behaves like mortar, building strata whose ridges and divots broadcast the hand that made them. Rooney thereby converts what the screen flattens—color, gesture, time—back into a topography the eye must navigate slowly.

IMG_0704 debuted in Rooney’s 2021 exhibition @SomeHighTide at Arts + Leisure, New York, where one hundred such miniatures were dispersed across the gallery walls and, crucially, reproduced on a dedicated Instagram account of the same name. Viewers could pinch-zoom the posts at home or “zoom with their feet” on site, toggling between optic and haptic modes of attention. Critics noted how the installation laid bare the ergonomics of looking: the square, long a modernist emblem, became a metric of screen-bound life, while the paintings themselves functioned as “pixels made flesh.”

Materially, the work belongs to Rooney’s broader project of slowing down information flows. Where her paper paper series pulpifies newspapers to re-materialize the news cycle, these oil thumbnails decelerate the cascade of digital imagery by demanding intimate, one-to-one viewing. The dense, knifed layers resist easy photography; bitmap compression cannot capture the incised edges or subtle shifts from matte to gloss. Thus, each post of @SomeHighTide is a placeholder for a stubbornly physical thing, reminding us that the copy can never eclipse the original’s complexity.

Within contemporary painting, IMG_0704 situates Rooney at the forefront of artists who mine the feedback loop between canvas and screen. By conflating the miniature tradition of Persian manuscripts or European portrait miniatures with the vernacular square of social media, she forges a hybrid form tailored to an age of attention scarcity. For the Robledo-Palop Collection, the piece anchors a conversation about how tactile objects can reclaim agency in an era dominated by intangible networks, an eloquent reminder that even in two inches of space, painting can still outwit the algorithm.

Provenance

Arts + Leisure Gallery, New York

Acquired from the above, January 2021

Exhibitions

@SomeHighTide, New York, Arts + Leisure Gallery, January 16 – February 21, 2021 (illustrated in color in the catalogue, n/p).

 Literature

Cigdem Asatekin, “Julia Rooney: @SomeHighTide,” The Brooklyn Rail, February 2021, n/p (illustrated in color)

Online Version: https://brooklynrail.org/2021/02/artseen/Julia-Rooney-SomeHighTide.