Rooney is a storyteller whose enigmatic work spans painting, performance, sculpture, and installation. Her ephemeral installations engage with themes of materiality and the human subject to explore the chaos of politics and the latent violence of our society, whether in the home, in female identity, or in the body. 

For the artist’s first major solo exhibition in Canada, Rooney will transform a floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art by enveloping it in a large-scale mural, making use of all original walls. This temporary, site-specific environment will become home to sculptural characters and scenarios composed from ubiquitous household materials, found objects, stuffed fabric, and paint. 

Having spent her teenage years in Markham, Ontario, Rooney’s experiences of suburban North America inform her choice of materials, colour palette, and subject matter. Her work explores notions of traditional femininity through the lenses of domestic space, the political haven of the garden, consumption-based societies, and the mythological. At the same time, Rooney probes how our bodies are informed by and respond to the environments, systems, and inanimate objects that surround us.