Infinite Iotic: 3 videos inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 Nebula award-winning novel The Dispossessed.
Blue, Warm, October: Every moment with concentrated color from the movie Blue is the Warmest Color (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013), The Hunt for Red October (John McTiernan, 1990), and Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1993) are combined to a montage of filmic light out of context. The tinted scenes in their original sequences are used to emphasize the rhetorical, visual language of film, similar to music’s effect on a moving image’s audience. Here the dislodged scenes are collaged together to to raise questions about how even the most subtle of visual cues can inspire loss, patriotism and desire.
Letters From Annares: Considering the ingrained rhetoric in public letters, specifically looking at the letters written between the two main characters in The Dispossessed, and a letter Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote to Martin Van Buren regarding the Trail of Tears, three scenes are created with dialogue from deconstructed letters. Each vignette uses the Socratic method of discussion to examine how political and cultural rhetoric seeps into even our most common language around work, travel and intimate relationships.
Nostalgia: 8 minutes from Andrei Tarkovshy’s 1983 film Nostalghia recreated with animation and montage. The soliloquy from the film’s secondary character, Domenico, at the end of the movie in which he blames humans for their own destruction and the destruction of our planet is reinterpreted in the context of contemporary resource depletion and global warming.
Em Rooney is a New York-based artist, writer and curator born in Bridgeport, Connecticut. She received her bachelor’s degree from Hampshire College and her MFA from Tyler School of Art. In 2012 she was a participant at Skowhegan. Solo and two person shows include The Word For Forest, Bodega, New York (2016); Night Paintings, Beverly’s, New York (2014); Flesh and Ground, The Good Press Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland (2013); All Alone, Vox Populi, Philadelphia (2011); and Like Flex / Like Flex with Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, Bodega, Philadelphia (2010).
