Danielle Roney: Vista

Danielle Roney, Vista
Opening Reception: Friday November 7, 2008 6:30 –8:30 pm
Exhibition Dates: Nov 7 – Jan 17, 2008

Danielle Roney provides a convergence of digital and physical realities through contrasts of the built environment to the convergence of cognitive containment of the individual.

In Vista, the perspective of locational identities is explored through the decomposition of the visual and physical space of cities. As virtual communities and digital information systems compress the space-time relationships of the global environment, definable boundaries breakdown into fluid forms of mobility. Creating quandaries in the identification of self associated with the history and previously conceived inert appearances of place.

“The economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from the voyage also removed from it the reality of space.” - Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle.

The vistas imagined through the memory of place transcend and recontextualize the place itself through the rapid visual influx of patterns and forms intuitively embedded in the complex layers of the psyche associated with the personification of locality.

Roney explores the journey of psycho-geography in her own travels to Johannesburg, South Africa through the virtual creation of recollected space. Three-dimensional animated settings intersect documentary photography in a rapid session of visual impulses to capture movements in time, place and memory – a simultaneity of past, present and future in the cyclical dance of continual reinvention. An interactive experience allows the viewer to manipulate the order of space and time along the virtual journey, providing a more intimate memory structure to continue to be reformulated by the individual. Mixed media constructions combine illusion and plasticity to reflect the spatial morphing of the psyche.

“The catalogue of forms is endless: until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born. When the forms exhaust their variety and come apart, the end of cities begins.” - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Vista opens in conjunction with the Genesis Trial: Johannesburg exhibition on view at The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, October 4- November 15, 2008