Malleable Geometry

Orleans Gallery – OSA, Shenkman Arts Centre, Ottawa, 2020

Curator : Jakub Zdebik

Press release excerpt:

Sarah Rooney’s MALLEABLE GEOMETRY puts on display the poetic fluidity of her hybrid practice of painting and photography to reveal how contemporary aesthetics intertwine with modernism.

An abstract green motif that peers out of a grey and ochre surface seems, at first, to be a funky take on Barnett Newman’s zip. But the zigzag’s point of origin is the uneven edge of an old studio radiator. Vast open spaces and swooping formalist patterns read as stern at first sight yet, under scrutiny, they reveal a playful geography of warm desert tones.

Rooney’s works are not ironic takes on avant-garde aesthetics to satisfy a postmodernist desire for pastiche; they engage, on a sincere level, with real objects and spaces and their artistic transformation. - Jakub Zdebik 2020