Shaw Osha + Julia Rooney
Feels Like
March 21–April 26, 2026
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 21, 6-8pm
A lighthouse’s geographical range is the greatest distance the curvature of the earth permits an object of a given height to be seen from a particular height of eye without regard to luminous intensity or visibility conditions.
We met by chance at an art lecture in New York. We started talking and realized we lived near each other. Several years went by, and we never really kept in touch, but we didn’t not stay in touch either. Maybe there was something kindred in us but not explicit, except we are both artists who grew up in New York City and make work that cares about light. We reconnected on a hot summer day in August 2024 and again the following summer. In the fall, we began a collaboration at a distance over the dark months, using text message as the most expedient medium.
We began sending each other cross-country weather reports from our respective locations. Our geographical range was the 3000-mile distance between us—Julia in New York, NY (40° N, 74°W), Shaw in Olympia, WA (47° N, 122°W)—and our particular height, without regard to visibility conditions. Feels like this from here.
We wrote during the dark months of short, cold days, November through February. Sometimes we reported numeric facts like temperature, pressure, humidity, dew point—facts our phone app told us, but didn’t always mean much in our bodies. We wrote many words about color and light, trying to describe the sky as it changed from sunrise to sunset. Eventually, personal notes got stitched into the weather reports. There was overlap in the categories of sickness, relationships, the small world around us, and the wide umbrella of politics. We made paintings during these months. The words and paintings did not describe each other, but they came about in a similar fashion: daily, accumulative, conditioning, non-heroic, facts of being.
Now it is March. We meet in Bellingham, WA, and bring the writing and the paintings into a small room that is round-like, like the earth. We install them across the walls, bringing a curvature by wrapping words and images, and open a show on the weekend of the Spring Equinox.
—Shaw Osha & Julia Rooney
Shaw Osha is an artist and educator and has just finished an assemblage that reimagines her work over the last ten years as an artist’s book. The book mixes painting projects with writing to contemplate the relentlessness of racialization in American culture since slavery. Using fragile and unstable materials like pigments, flowers, paper, emotions, and language, her book compares, intersects, and maybe fleetingly locates a haunting of a personal, collective, and social ghost that resists comprehension or meaning but returns and repeats. She has exhibited in galleries including the Ali Center in Louisville, KY, the Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University and Satellite UNC in Chapel Hill, NC. She was raised in New York City and lives in Olympia, WA where she is a member of the faculty at Evergreen State College and teaches an interdisciplinary arts curriculum.
Julia Rooney is a New York-based visual artist who makes paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Sensitive to the increasing dominance of a screen-based world, she creates work rooted in physicality and bodily perception of one’s environment, often responding to conditions such as light, scale, texture, and architecture. In addition to paint, she uses postal correspondence, cyanotype and other explicitly analog technologies to capture a sense of time and place. Rooney has exhibited her work widely throughout the United States and been awarded residencies and fellowships through The Joan Mitchell Foundation, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and Yale University Art Gallery, amidst others. She was born and raised in New York City, where she currently lives and works as a Teaching Artist.