Megan Rooney, Okie dog on Santa Monica, 2015, acrylic, marker, ink, crayon, pencil, oil pastel, on free magazines collected on Via Roma, Torino, 21 x 29.7 cm
In the wake of rampant, market-led nonsense, art is rekindling its fascination with poetry. Recently, galleries such as BHQFU in New York, David Roberts Foundation in London and SALTS in Basel have been throwing poetry events, and art platforms such as Rhizome and 11:11 have been hosting online projects dedicated to verse. Part of the reason for this increase of interest in poesie is due to the revival of performance art as well as the influence of the internet. The web is not only making it easier for poets to distribute their work, but also changing they way we use words and altering poetry’s material – our language. Megan Rooney is one of the five poets the art world is listening to.
Taken from Sleek 47
The net is an important influence on Rooney’s writing. Her style features short sentences and shifting personal pronouns that resemble the parlance of online communication. Nonetheless, she considers this approach accidental. “It’s the result of years of late night ICQ chat messenger conversations with friends,” she says. “There’s a certain style that comes from talking through devices. Abbreviated, dense. It’s one of the language forms that’s in our environment now, so it’s natural to combine it with the other forms.”
Based in London but originally from Toronto, there is a sense of urgency and intimacy to her work. In “Tilia Americana”, a 2014 commission for UK online artspace Opening Times, she narrates a video with a dream-like monologue while images of female bodies obscured by water- coloured pillowcases float past the screen.
Recently she has completed a day long live performance entitled “Last days. Last days. Last days.” at the Serpentine, which was embedded within the recent exhibition by Duane Hanson. During this, she invited her audience to walk around the performance space while she read poetry alongside videos of the Floridian landscape, while performers created strange choreographed movements.
“I originally conceived this project as sound art,” she says. “However, when I was doing a residency at Fondation Galleries Lafayette in Paris, I had the idea that this text should be listened to while you’re walking. Moving through a space while listening to something really changes the dynamic.”
The content of the internet also feeds into what she does. “I’m really into sifting through the ‘trash’ online – minor news stories that would never make it into the international press if it wasn’t for online news,” she adds. “Certain aspects of my characters are influenced from reading these stories as well as my IRL experiences and personal narrative.”
As such, she also considers her writing to reflect contemporary theoretical concerns about the instability of identity: “Isn’t that person that gets presented for consumption in newspaper or TV interviews actually just a moment taken out of the flow of being?” she ponders. “There are so many different conceptions of selfhood that it seems like we sometimes just slip in and out of them. Maybe I take that position that a little further through my work.”
Indeed, Rooney’s work also shifts between the aesthetic and the aural, the visible and the hidden and performance and installation. And even her language seems to be full of visual imagery, created through words instead of shapes, colours or textures.
www.meganrooney.net
Text: Francesca Gavin
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