Em Rooney

Interview by Wendy Vogel

Em Rooney and I first met over a sundown dinner at Storm King Art Center in 2015, when she was a resident at the Shandaken Project sited on the sculpture park’s grounds. Over the ensuing years, I’ve witnessed her work evolve in various exhibitions at spaces like Bodega (her gallery in New York) and the Museum of Modern Art (where she was included in the 2018 “Being: New Photography” survey). Drawing from aesthetics related to forms like jewelry, church iconography, and botany, Rooney creates handmade armatures for her images in materials ranging from metal to glass. For a solo exhibition in 2020 at Los Angeles’s François Ghebaly gallery (installation view above), she presented standalone sculptures for the first time, shown alongside a series of photographs.

Despite knowing each other for half a decade, this conversation was our first long-form opportunity to talk about Rooney’s practice. This edit represents only a fraction of our talk, conducted in August over Zoom. We pivot from the cinematic influences that partly inspired her new work, to an exchange about the politics of feminist reclamation, to how community does (and doesn’t) enter her practice.

Study for RJ’s quilt (after Eva Hesse), 2019

Silk, cashmere, denim, cotton batting, thread, pewter, mylar, pine, sand-casted aluminum

108 x 52 x 6 in.

Wendy Vogel (WV): Let’s begin with the new images you sent from your studio. It looks like this body of work has a similar point of departure from the series you showed in “Women in Fiction,” your solo show at François Ghebaly in 2020–21. There’s one new work that's bolted to the wall and projects outward in a botanical shape. There’s another work with a hanging armature and cast forms that resemble peppers and little hanging plants. Is there a botanical connection between the last show and these new works?

Em Rooney (ER): Yes. The difference is that with this body of work, I'm thinking about set design, props and costumes, and specifically about women in a series of films that helped prompt the work. Although the forms are botanical, they're less directly observed and more of the realm of fantasy and film.

WV: Are these films that you are making or films that already exist in the world?

ER: They are films that already exist in the world. I'm working on a piece of writing that I hope to have released, maybe as part of a zine, that looks at mid-century Italian films and their women characters. I’m studying some of the classic Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Federico Fellini films—and their architectures and costuming as ornate enclosures for their female leads—as a conceptual response to the collapse of the Italian Empire.

I'm wondering if these methods created a pattern or mold from which many contemporary films’ material strategies are cast. I'm not solely thinking about Italy in this one moment, but it's really those films that triggered a set of ideas around where these sculptures could go that moved me forward from the last body of work.

Now I Turn Gray Now I Turn Gold, 2020

A Little Language Like Lovers Use, 2020

WV: I watched Antonioni’s Red Desert (1964) for the first time a couple months ago. That film is extremely painterly and also has a critical take on modernity and industrialization. In that way, there is a stark departure from what was happening in Hollywood in the 1960s. It was only in the ‘70s when Hollywood caught up to what was happening in culture. European ‘60s art house film, on the other hand, was more responsive to the contentions of the moment, as well as the counterculture.

ER: There’s a lot of things happening with Red Desert but, on a tactile level, I think that was Antonioni's first color film. He even painted the landscape. He had low-flying airplanes sprinkle dust on things to make them look more black or more green. I think that those trees in that barren industrial landscape, in those first couple of shots, are actually painted to look more saturated.

There's something cool about making a film in such a tactile, painterly way. We don’t have to go down a rabbit hole, but I’ve been thinking about what was happening in the '70s, and the American film renaissance dealing with this existential crisis of the violence that is America. The Italian version of that came earlier, and perhaps with more self-inflicted humiliation. Maybe it’s because the Italian empire was such a short-lived, failing endeavor compared to the ongoing colonial influence of the US. There's no resolve. It's just this ongoing self-hatred in being a privileged subject. In those American films of the ‘70s, the male leads reflect that ongoing crisis (like Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces), whereas in the Italian films, there's something slapstick about the failure to conquer, or the shame associated with being a conqueror.

“What creative production should be doing is unpacking or disbanding the pieces that come together to make archetypes or symbols. Culture is a mediator that presents various representations of lived experience and, in the case of art—at least good art, hopefully—these representations are more complex than those of propaganda or commercial strategies.”

WV: I want to return to “Women in Fiction” at Ghebaly. For that exhibition you created a body of sculpture that was separate from the photographic elements, in part because COVID-19 shifted the focus of the photographic project. You had originally planned to remake Garry Winogrand’s Women Are Beautiful (1968), but street photography wasn’t exactly possible because of the pandemic. What's the relationship now between photography and this new body of sculptural work? Are they separate, or are they together?

ER: Separating those two bodies of work has less to do with the fact that I couldn't complete the project, because in the end I did travel and I did take photos. The sculptures evolved in a natural way alongside those photographs. I've been making photographs, sculptures, and writing since I became an artist. These are the modalities that I gravitated towards for self-expression. The particular relationship between the image and the sculpture, or the film and the sculpture, is not something that is conceptually fleshed out in advance of their making. It’s a problem that I hope the viewer will grapple with. That lack of resolve between the images and objects is a huge part of what I want the experience of the work to be.

WV: You have a lot of trust in your viewers, I think.

ER: Thinking about it as trust is interesting. Or it’s optimism or indifference. It might be a combination of all three of those things.

WV: “Women in Fiction” seems like one of your first shows that did not directly address the iconography of the Catholic church, although women are not only icons in their own right, but also stand in for larger ideas, in both fiction and the church. You could even say that they're appropriated or absorbed into symbols. What is your relationship to symbol production?

ER: So many institutions rely on symbols to propagate their messaging. The church relies on symbols. Government relies on not just symbols, but also archetypes. Political movements, educational institutions, the organizations that try to order humanity, they all rely on symbols. But I wouldn't say that fiction necessarily creates symbols. In fact, I would say it creates them less than these other institutions or structures that we're talking about. What creative production should be doing is unpacking or disbanding the pieces that come together to make archetypes or symbols. Culture is a mediator that presents various representations of lived experience and, in the case of art—at least good art, hopefully—these representations are more complex than those of propaganda or commercial strategies.

I do think that there was a moment, especially with photographs, when I was invested in creating something closer to a symbol or an icon, for the sake of indexing things and people to protect them from erasure. I can tap into both of those modalities. But, in this most recent work, I'm thinking more about how to acknowledge symbols and pull them apart.

Pinky Ring Edition of 4 (You, Me, Mariana, and Jess): Part 1, 2019

Steel, cement coating, polystyrene, enamel, pewter, leather, hardware

60 x 23 x 13 in.

WV: Does that conceptual photographic work happen in staging photographs or in processing them or in creating the handmade frames in which to present them? Or does it happen on all of those registers?

ER: It happens in my relationship to the visual world, in my internal processing. I trust myself that the outcome, once filtered through my thinking and my making, will be representative of the larger work that I'm trying to do around that. And if it's not, that's where editing and being in your studio and having conversations with peers comes in. Then you're processing it after the fact.

WV: During a Zoom conversation you had with artist Molly Zuckerman-Hartung during the Ghebaly show, you described your sculptural work and working methods as inverses to monoliths. Can you say more about that?

ER: I was thinking about the monolith in terms of concrete forms that are erected in the tradition of male fabrication, whether that's the Minimalist sculpture of Carl Andre or the monuments of Confederate soldiers. My works could be considered inverses to monoliths in terms of their materiality, fragility, and methods of construction, and maybe even their reliance on the wall. That group of works were all very vulvar and vaginal—not phallic. Their form, as well as their politics or ethos, is an inverse to the monolith.

But you can also think about a monolith as a land mass, like the forms that come out of the earth and embody their self-knowledge as chunks of geologic history. Or, for example, the monument in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey: I’m thinking about Authur Jafa’s brilliant analysis of the Black monolith and its “advanced” and “evolved” existence as a “Black sentient entity,” to use the precise words from his essay “My Black Death.” In that way, I could aspire for the work to be monolithic, to embody at once a knowingness and also an inability to be known. The mystery of the monolith is a very appealing idea to me, like a Trisha Donnelly sculpture. If I were able to make something like that—that would be so incredible. Though, I tend to love work that is layered and multifaceted and touched, like Liz Magor sculptures or a Xylor Jane painting.

“I don't think my work is part of any reclamation project, because, for starters, I'm not capable of resurrection. I'm not a high priestess or something. But also, I don't think that that work needs to be resurrected or reclaimed. I think it needs to be spoken about differently and contextualized differently.”

WV: I'm interested in the way that you talk about your recent flower sculptures’ relationship to ‘60s and ‘70s feminist art history. I absolutely see a formal correspondence with artists like Lee Bontecou and Ree Morton. I'm curious if you see this aesthetic as part of a reclamation project, artistically or politically?

ER: I have so much to say about that. I don't think my work is part of any reclamation project, because, for starters, I'm not capable of resurrection. I'm not a high priestess or something. But also, I don't think that that work needs to be resurrected or reclaimed. I think it needs to be spoken about differently and contextualized differently.

It wasn’t my intention to make work that was reminiscent of another moment. There's work that I'm drawn to and that I absorb. Because of this moment we’re living in, artists are always absorbing from a web of influences. That’s what it is to be contemporary, right? Having said that, I don't really think of Lee Bontecou or Ree Morton as being a part of feminist art history. They are a part of our contemporary moment, even as much as they are of our history. I visited a Ree Morton show at Skidmore College with three very different artists. We all responded to that show favorably—her material choices, the readymade-ness, the complex wall/floor relationship, the installation-based work and photographs versus discrete objects, the accessibility of her materials. All of these things are representative of an agile, committed, deeply thoughtful artist who was reflective of her time. Sure, there's a ribbon, and there's a flower, and there's some handwritten text, but does that put her in this codified, closed-off zone of feminist art history? Why, when you go to MoMA for the Bruce Nauman retrospective and see him using drippy plaster, clothing hangers and cut cardboard, is Bruce Nauman not part of feminist art history? Why is he a contemporary artist? I think that there's a tendency to put women and people of color—people who have less access to resources or are more marginal in the world of art-making—into these categories like “outsider,” “vernacular,” “provincial,” “feminist.”

WV: Regional.

ER: Regional—totally, right? That is a myth created to support the excellence of white male artists and their separation from every other maker. Nobody's talking about Gedi Sibony as a feminist artist, or reflecting his specific locales. They talk about the use of modest materiality in relationship to his work, but the practice gets to be something that's reflective of dominant culture or capitalism, and that deconstructs those things mysteriously, with an invisible author. It gets to exist in the realm of big ideas. I just wonder why that is. I don't think that the work I'm making, or the work being made by artists I really love, is any less complexly related to larger themes in culture and politics for not being reflective of a white straight male subjectivity.

She'll Close, 2020

Welded steel, enamel paint, burlap and Hydrocal, milk paint, velvet, epoxy resin

84 x 29 x 16 in.

WV: I'm not trying to accuse you of being strategic. Even though your process sounds very fluid and authentic, I am curious about whether you had to overcome a certain aesthetic bias. Was there a rediscovery process in making this work that was maybe excavating some shame or embarrassment?

ER: I think that makes a lot of sense if you frame it like that, but the work that you’re talking about is work that I’ve always been drawn to in an unembarrassed way. You’re talking about work that helped me see myself within a lineage of makers. I never thought there was anything embarrassing about it, even if others did. For instance, when I was in graduate school, my work was compared to Tracey Emin’s, disparagingly. I truly didn’t understand until then that these types of material practices were considered uncool. I think about my life as an artist into the future, and each show being a piece of a collage that I’m trying to weave together. I want the textures and the materials to be surprising, but also to follow some type of logic. What is strategic about the show is its formal relationship to, say, the “Ordinary Time” show at Bodega in 2018, which was austere. So, in some ways, it's about how to pivot in ways that are dynamic from one body of work to the next.

On a personal level, I've lived a very insular life in a lot of ways. Even though I come from a huge Irish-Italian Catholic family, my sister and I were raised by an Italian single mother in rural Vermont. In that time and place, there weren't a lot of single parents and I didn't know a lot of other culturally specific Italian-Americans. When I was young our home was a very woman-centered space of immodesty that I recreated throughout my life. When I left home, I found a queer community which is basically still my community today. When Chris Domenick (my lover and collaborator) and I moved to Massachusetts, most of the people in our immediate community were men. Most of my teaching colleagues are men. Chris and I live alone in a house in a rural place. It was really the first time that I was completely cut off from this safety net of femaleness and queerness that I've felt held by my entire life. I never experienced myself as a woman in the world as much as I have since we moved here.

It impacted what I thought about making, what I thought about myself, and what I thought about myself in relationship to other women. If there's a reclamation, it maybe has to do with me digging my heels in the ground and becoming more outspoken. I had never needed to be before, because my positions were generally shared by others in my communities. Maybe, indirectly, I wanted this last body of work to reflect that in some ways.

“I don't think that the work I'm making, or the work being made by artists I really love, is any less complexly related to larger themes in culture and politics for not being reflective of a white straight male subjectivity.”

WV: Thank you for sharing that with me. I feel your generosity in offering that to me.

Maybe we can return to the question about viewership. How do you perceive your audience or audiences?

ER: There’s some impulse with the work to draw in as many people as possible and to cast a wide net. I think that this impulse is reflected in my material choices, my color and textural surface choices, and even the way I utilize the familiar, through forms that belong to Christianity, decoration, clothing, jewelry, or images. And then there's something in the work that is incomprehensible or personal. Maybe there's even a response to the audience that's angry and repellent.

I like thinking about the way various audiences will be drawn into the work because of these tactics, and then ultimately find themselves unable to comprehend the ideas that I'm putting forward. Those who can see the work, or who don't feel alienated by it, will be able to engage with it most deeply or imagine themselves within it. Sable Elyse Smith’s press release for the “Women in Fiction” show was amazing. My favorite part about it is that she uses the word “we,” and then includes an asterisk to specify that “there is no we here.” “We” excludes the reader from a potentially shared identity. The right to self-determine your “we” is a privilege in viewership. Art also teaches you how to be excluded.

Are Scared By the Land, 2018 (recto and verso)

Pewter, fiberglass, Aqua-Resin, silver, steel, screws, iPad

4:20 video on loop

Are Scared By the Land, 2018 (recto and verso)

Pewter, fiberglass, Aqua-Resin, silver, steel, screws, iPad

4:20 video on loop

WV: It’s fascinating to listen to your logic about navigating through anger. It sounds like a kind of test.

ER: I think anger is a normal part of the lived experience in this world that's so built for suffering.

WV: How does this notion of audience coexist with what you mentioned earlier, in terms of living in self-defined feminist communities?

ER: Community is very important, but I don't think of community in relationship to my art-making as much as I think about it as a personal necessity. I can't exist without community and I've always prioritized it. The aspects in my work that look like community are less about that than they are about the experiences that I'm trying to facilitate, or what Chris and I do with our artist-run space Gertrude. We started Gertrude in 2019 on a historic property that we were caretaking and we hope to bring it back in 2022. These forms of community-building and art-making are separate, but I also think that it's important that they remain so.

“I think anger is a normal part of the lived experience in this world that's so built for suffering.”

WV: I get that. I also maintain some separation between how I define my community versus how I define my work. In fact, I recently wrote a piece about why I maintain this very stubborn and outdated rule of not writing reviews about my artist friends’ work. Community is important to how I conceive my work, but there isn't a complete enmeshment. That said, the priorities of my community still enter my work because of the kinds of practices that I'm drawn to.

ER: I think that's very well said, and I do think it's an important distinction to make. I don't want to falsely claim that I'm working in the Julie Ault model of Group Material. While I think she is an incredible artist and writer, that's not the model. But I also don't want to frame that out in some way that distances me from a feminist practice or ethos. I think about and love writing about friends' work, and there is a way that can be a part of community-building. I mean, Roni Horn took all of those photographs of her niece and that work isn't about family, right? It gets to be about geologic time and poetry and perhaps intimate knowledge of a person, but it's not about family.

There are aspects of those community-based practices that have influenced me. I remember thinking a lot about Tim Rollins and K.O.S. after seeing their work in San Francisco before I moved to New York, but, in the end, for better or worse, my practice is an object and studio-based practice. Everyone makes a choice (consciously or unconsciously) about what type of artist they will be, and this is how I've made mine.

Wendy Vogel

Wendy Vogel is a writer, critic and independent curator. A former editor at Flash Art International, Modern Painters, and Art in America, she has written about art and culture for Artforum, art-agenda, BOMB, Frieze, The Guardian and MOUSSE, among other publications. Vogel has curated or co-curated exhibitions at the Hessel Museum at Bard College, The Kitchen, Abrons Art Center, VOLTA NY, bitforms, and EFA Project Space. She currently teaches in the photography department at Parsons School of Design. She was a 2018 recipient of a Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant in Short-Form Writing.