These stories take us away from the crowd, to abandoned people, hidden places, unregarded moments and unreliable histories. Rooney mixes absurdity, comedy and artifice with echoes of Flann O’Brien, Samuel Beckett, Donald Barthelme and George Saunders. I Can Travel Far From Here implores us to join a wayward evangelical mission involving toy military vehicles. In Lost High Street a tourist realises he is a ghost trapped forever on a sightseeing bus as punishment for an act of espionage. And in Thin Air a student believes a university building is speaking to him, via his cassette recorder, about European wars and revolutions.
Paul Rooney is a visuat artist, writer and musician based in Liverpool. His installations, videos, writings and records focus on the instabilities and deceptions of narrative, particularly in relation to representing place: its everyday life; its history and folklore; its familiar strangeness. His pieces – usually starting with a disembodied voice accompanied by music – assemble reliable and unreliable stories generated by archives, interviews, hearsay or objects. These fragmented stories, which often alternate between comedy, pathos and back again, are then further disrupted through the foregrounding of the artifice of the art making process. Despite, or because of, their failures and fabrications, the works attempt to somehow do justice to the constantly shifting, indeterminate process that is ‘real life’ – and our efforts to perceive it.
