Queen Projects is pleased to present a collaboration between artists Julia Rooney and Shaw Osha: a call and response during the dark months—one person on the East Coast, the other on the West Coast

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.