Sensitive to the increasing power that digital, virtual, and augmented realities command, Julia Rooney (b. 1989, New York, NY) creates paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Rooney’s paintings reference specific technological structures that have come to condition how and what we see, including framing devices, webs, windows, pixilation, algorithms and QR codes. Working at radically different scales, she mimics the way online spaces often juxtapose the micro with the macro, distorting one’s sense of reality. She creates built-up and tactile surfaces—sometimes by cannibalizing old canvases and stitching them back together—countering the way screens flatten the texture of our world. These stitched-together passages conjure up the constructed architecture of our digital world, one built by humans and sustained by their data, even as this architecture often goes unexamined in our daily use of it.