DANIELLE RONEY
Frequencies of Opacity
March 5 – April 30, 2020
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THE WORK
In Frequencies of Opacity, artist Danielle Roney presents three bodies of work developed through research and community engagement around contemporary migrant experiences. Migration patterns, immigration policy, and migrant and refugee experiences have been the focus of Roney’s work for the last two decades, the center of a practice rooted in nomadic research and the impact of technology on society. Her recent works are poetic visualizations expressing resilient affirmations of strength in difference.
Whispers are 3D printed sculptures formed by algorithmically interpreting vocal recordings of readings by and about migrants, intended to embody the physical intimacy of a whisper. Strata Series: Zero and Strata Series: Zero-One are light-based sculptures, the first in an ongoing series, that translates biofeedback and voice data recorded by migrant collaborators into visual patterns. Finally, PUBLICS is a live-streaming camera network accessible only to a migrant collaborator, turning the table on surveillance culture and the norms of art viewership.
This exhibition reprises and builds on Roney’s recent participation in knowledges at the Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas. It was curated by Joey Orr, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator for Research, as part of the Integrated Arts Research Initiative and funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
ARTIST’S STATEMENT
Occupying Institutional Spaces through Immateriality
To understand and embrace opacity is to claim the sovereignty of self. To live in difference. To evolve in relation to the experiences of exchange. Negating Otherness for totality*. Migration is a human right to survival as a part of nature and being in the world. The fractal order of Glissant’s chaos-monde.†
When our bodily presence, in and of itself, is criminalized and the borderlands of institutionalized spaces have collapsed, how does the ‘illegal’ migrant occupy these spaces?
We must support an irreducible legitimacy, as a means of liberation, sustaining a multiplicity of potentials through interfaces of exchange and thus intersubjectivity. By leveraging immateriality as a strategy of human freedom, we create portals perforating these spaces, where autonomous algorithms empower virtual culture to create radical vehicles of ethnography.
As a series of parallel futures and histories, “self” within a migrant condition is emphasized through layered proximities. Simultaneous, bifurcating movements redefine the spatial relationship of encounters, where time and space are deconstructed and our fragmented reality is negotiated through the lens of a participatory state of exile.
The rhizomatic perspective of these vehicles embraces a personal addressal beyond critique, where from positions of power and beauty, self-determinacy may form in generous and genuine ways.
* Glissant, Edouard., Poetics of Relation. (AnnArbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2010) xv. Translator Betsy Wing, interprets Glissant’s identities of the world; totalite-monde, to be concrete and quantifiable.
† See Glissant (2010), chaos-monde, referring to spiraling and redundant trajectories. Noting echos-monde as the third world identity, feedback.
THE ARTIST
Danielle Roney is known for site-specific installations and sculpture that explore technology's effect on migration and cultures. Roney’s work has been reviewed in Art in America and ArtPapers, and was recently featured in knowledges at the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Roney studied sculpture and digital media at the University of Georgia and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her best-known project, Global Portals, has been presented in numerous transnational, networked public spaces through the world. She exhibited in the Beijing off-biennale ‘Convergence’ (curated by Feng Boyi and CS Kiang) and has produced installations, commissions and works for exhibitions in Johannesburg, Venice (IT), Sao Paulo, Istanbul and numerous US museums and permanent public collections. Roney is recipient of several grants, awards and recognition, including the National Endowment of the Arts, the Loridans Foundation and the 2010 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
PRESS
Danielle Roney: Frequencies of Opacity - this is tomorrow
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