Taney Roniger
Taney Roniger is a visual artist, writer, and curator based in New York. A painter for many years, she has recently turned to drawing, finding it to be the most direct visual expression of the intelligence of the human body. Her work has been shown in a number of venues here and abroad, including: Robert Henry Contemporary, Lesley Heller Workspace, Sperone Westwater, The Islip Art Museum, and StandPipe Gallery in New York; the Contemporary Arts Center and The Front in New Orleans; and the Pera Museum in Istanbul, Turkey. Her awards and honors in the visual arts include three Yaddo fellowships, a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and a traveling fellowship from the Stacey Sussman Cavrell Memorial Foundation. Since 2012, she has been a contributing writer at The Brooklyn Rail, for which she served as Guest Editor in December 2017. Her writing has also appeared in Interalia, Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine, Big Red & Shiny, Transverse, and On-Verge. A graduate of Yale University, where she received her MFA, she teaches in the fine arts department at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She divides her time between Queens and the Catskills.
Artist’s Statement
If collage is an art of assemblage in which disparate pieces are arranged to form a whole, then my Microscapes might be described as digital collages. For just as in traditional — or analogue — collage, the raw material in these works is a collection of discrete units, in this case extracted sections of my hand-made drawings that have been digitally scanned. Manipulating these sections in Photoshop by means of layering and juxtaposition, I create new compositions more complex than the original drawings. In the final step of the process, each of these small compositions is printed on fiber paper, mounted on mat board, and glued to a substrate in an array of others. As in any collage, the whole should be greater than the sum of its parts.