Emily Rooney
Down On Me, December 2010, concrete, fabric, feathers, 2.5x5"
.jpg)
Single for the Night (Brooklyn queers dance to Lil' Wayne), December 2010, video
Artist Statement
I consider the implications of basic materials (clay, concrete, plaster, and silver) and the debasement of that which is deemed overtly romantic, mythical, masculine, or feminine by art history. My sculptures and photographs employ a post-minimal investigation of queer visuality, and assert no hierarchy between a minimal object and an object imbued with content. With this dialogue between two classes of objects I attempt to illuminate the phenomenological possibilities that lie within these opposing formal devices. This queered formalism challenges the way artistic techniques have been gendered and normalized as well as illuminating ambivalence and melancholy often caused by one’s gender. The larger goal of my work is to situate queerness within a visual context that dismantles/is dismantled by identity politics, the constructs of modernism, and the critical negation of post-modernism.