Conor Rooney

Conor Rooney uses a unique technique to capture something that to most people means nothing more than a momentary nuisance: errors in digital video playback. Instead of skipping forward, Conor conserves the ephemeral fragments of creation that emerge as the playback software tries to interpret the corrupted data in layered paintings covered with epoxy resin.  The results are like windows into a digital dream world. These photos show him starting a new painting from scratch and I will follow his process as the painting develops in three dimensions with each added layer.

I’ve been interested in these kind of shapes that appear when there is data missing in video, in normal context they are errors but when searched for they become something else. I partially download movies through pirate torrents, searching the files for instances of these effects. My work extrapolates these instances, trying to make them tangible and unique. Transforming the error into the non digital world changes it, makes it correct somehow. The paintings created are consecutive layers of resin followed by oil paint, the image builds up over time to create three dimensional form. I like the contrast between the pristine of the resin and the subject matter.
-Conor Rooney