Run from the Shadows
“The horizon of the infinite” is no longer the horizon of the whole, but the “whole” (all that is) as put on hold everywhere, pushed to the outside just as much as it is pushed back inside the “self.” It is no longer a line that is drawn, or a line that will be drawn, which orients or gathers the meaning of a course of progress or navigation. It is the opening [la brèche] or distancing [l’écartement] of horizon itself, and in the opening: us. We happen as the opening itself, the dangerous fault line of a rupture.
-- Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular-Plural
How does one reconcile the ever-shifting target of reality often manifested, on the one hand, in the voracious consumption of information/images and on the other, the short-circuiting of the visual and linguistic act? Run from the Shadows explores the significance of sentient experience in the present moment—the reversibility of subject and object, of tactile perception and by extension, memory—in the formation of personal and collective histories. Here, the performative interactivity of body, object and image are triangulated as hinge between the internal and the external; as entre-deux that cipher and perceive the incoherence of lived experience and its subsequent cast-off: the remembered event. Each piece exists within this space of opening; as a threshold from which to cross over or fall back into. Together they comprise a collision of materials, corporeal and auditory, as a means of probing the instability of language and memory in the narration of social consciousness, repositioning the body as critical site of resistance, receptivity and when called for, revolution.
Kara Rooney is a Brooklyn-based artist and critic working in performance, sculpture and new media installation. Her visual work has been widely exhibited in international and domestic venues including Fridman Gallery, NY; Driscoll Babcock Gallery, NY; Brian Morris Gallery, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, NY; the Chelsea Art Museum, NY; the International Women’s Museum, CA; the Jersey City Museum, NJ; the Montclair Art Museum, NJ; and the Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey. She has been an artist in residence at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2015-16); the MeetFactory, Prague, CZ; La Quiñonera, Mexico City, MEX; the Queens College Art Center, NY; David Wolfe Editions, Portland, ME; and the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, Kansas City, MO. She is a Santo Foundation Individual Artist Grant recipient (2014) and her critical writings have been published in Art in America, The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and M/E/A/N/I/N/G. Rooney earned her MFA from the School of Visual Arts and is an Editor Emeritus for The Brooklyn Rail.
