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Danielle Roney, Genesis Trial: Johannesburg I
10am - 5pm
2007/2008 Working Artist Project
The MOCA GA 2007/2008 Working Artist Project selected by Jeffrey Grove, Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, High Museum of Art and Andrea Barnwell-Brownlee, Director, Spelman Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta.
About the Exhibition:
Danielle Roney, Genesis Trial: Johannesburg I
“Through the entangled journeys of time and space, the Genesis Trial Series looks at the evolution of the global self as it filters through the physical and virtual lands and invades the minds of each person and place.
Genesis Trial: Johannesburg emphasizes the journey to global citizenry and psychogeography in relationship to personal interactions in Johannesburg, South Africa. Considering the broader context of locational identity, the expressions of Italo Calvino’s Invisibile Cities, Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and architect Yona Freidman’s Spatial City, frame a balance of direct and abstract interpretations of personal mobility and its postmodern social implications.
As Genesis Trial unfolds in a series of global experiences, the artist is focused on the larger, universal aspects of the multiplicity of “modern” centers and the how time, space and place reveal themselves in an infinite complexity of layers; to later dissolve in the recollection of the traveler.
“To understand a place to is to understand unknowing. Not to define others history but to recognize the universal yet personal layers of societal contradiction. They coexist in a modern and urban landscape – yet are peppered with the expression of the soul embodied within the place.
To bring to it entangled encounters of previous places, but to live again as anew in the time provided.
This work encompasses the journey- the universality of the real and surreal aspects – layered in physical and virtual collisions – to allow the history of the journey, its present meaning and the future of it to be simultaneously significant within the experience.
For the intellect and the intuition to be one psyche, not to own the place but to offer a recollection of time as the defining forms evolve.”
-Danielle Roney
About the Artist:
Danielle Roney’s artistic practice democratizes spatial narratives to expose the impact and potentialities of our technological society. Working with mediated sculpture, architectures and time-based space, she interweaves isolation and connectedness, redefining the spatial relationship of encounters to transcend geographical, political and ideological barriers.
A Post-Futurist, Roney decodes collective behaviors and spatialized intelligence to underscore our macro and micro entanglements as the technological embodiment of potentials. Perspectives of our technological selves interrelate to issues of power, mobility and surveillance through a hybrid interpretation of biometry, expanded media and sculpture.
Working with mechanisms of Magical Realism, Roney occupies virtual liminal spaces where we negotiate our place in the world, emphasizing our migrant human condition through layered proximities. Simultaneous and infinite within a cyclical relationship, bifurcating movements between time and space are deconstructed and our fragmented reality is negotiated through the lens of a participatory experiential continuum.
Her work has been reviewed in Art in America and ArtPapers and featured in Noplaceness: Art in a Post-Urban Landscape and Dislocations, by Leonardo Electronic Almanac. She has received numerous grants including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia, Sony Electronics and the National Endowment of the Arts and awards from the Loridans Foundation. Roney was the designer of the U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale of Architecture 2010 with the High Museum of Art. She studied sculpture and digital media at the University of Georgia and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Danielle Roney’s website can be found here.
eGoli, 2008
A journey through the mythical city of eGoli, City of Gold, as Johannesburg was once known as, with architectural references of fractal geometry intrinsic throughout African culture. eGoli presents an interpretation of urban and organic forms, providing an allegorical vision, as part of an infinite variety of virtual conclusions.
As Genesis Trial extended in a series of global experiences, the artist focused on the larger, universal aspects of the multiplicity of “modern” centers and the how time, space and place reveal themselves in an infinite complexity of layers; later dissolved in the new mythologies of the migrant condition.
Urban LandCruiser
Contemporary migrations through the physical vehicle, as well as across the virtual airwaves, mask the history of invasions and coexistence as it cyclically decays and is reinvented.
Westcliff Hotel, Johannesburg: July 17, 2007
Focused on the temporality of migration, ownership of space and class structures associated with tourism. Spatial politics looked at the purchasing of time within an unfamiliar space versus the ownership associated with daily familiarity, which ultimately provided an uncomfortable intersection of shared intimacy and confinement.