Essex Flowers is thrilled to present FLATS, an exhibition of mail art and video installation by Anne Marie Rooney and Julia Rooney. The exhibition will open with a public reception on June 27. This marks the Rooney sisters’ second two-person show of collaborative work.

Since 2010, Anne Marie and Julia Rooney have used the U.S. Postal Service as a medium and site for collaboration, production, and distribution of visual and text-based work. Sending mixed media mail between apartments in Connecticut, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, the Rooneys’ shared practice reclaims the unwieldy histories often held in found objects, texts, and images, transforming them into new works.

In FLATS, Julia indexes selections of Anne Marie’s mail into strange new configurations, highlighting the artists’ work over fifteen years of distanced collaboration. Sandwiching and framing Anne Marie’s mailed items between plexiglass sheets, Julia references the U.S. Postal Service’s process of scanning every item that passes through its system. Presented as a series of themed “Flats” showcasing artwork that traveled at the flat rate of a stamp, each new composition names, collects, and rethinks the meaning of a longitudinal relationship. Where sometimes visual repetition is the common denominator, other “Flats” frame the very act of mail-sending, highlighting hand-cancellations, postmarks, and other evidence of the various hands through which each piece of mail passed. In this, the Rooneys posit the act of sending mail as fundamentally collaborative, each postcard or letter authored by artist and postal worker alike. Over the show’s monthlong run, new work by Anne Marie will continue to accrue in the gallery, delivered daily by mail carrier.

Accompanying the “Flats” is No stamps since Christmas, a new video work documenting a 1.5-mile walk from the National Mall to the Old Post Office Pavilion. Constructed between 1892 and 1899, this site has served variously as Washington D.C.’s General Post Office, the headquarters for the National Endowment for the Arts, a Trump International Hotel, and, today, a Waldorf Astoria. In No stamps since Christmas, Julia carries a plexiglass sculpture painted with a unique IMI code generated from the U.S. Postal Service’s Click-N-Ship® technology. Introduced in 2004, this service allows customers to pay for their postage at home by entering their package’s weight, size, and distance traveled, thereby generating accurate postage as a one-time scannable code. Playing on the idea of “being scanned,” Anne Marie videorecords Julia carrying this unwieldy sculpture, changing its configuration from a cube full of mail, to a flattened box, and finally to a disassembled set of squares to be mailed. Failing to find an open post office, she walks to a nearby CVS (now an official postal retailer), where she is informed that they have had “no stamps since Christmas.”

2025 marks the 250th anniversary of the postal service, making it an older public institution than the country itself. At a time when this essential public service is increasingly threatened with privatization, the Rooneys’ work recenters the mail as an indispensable site of care, collaboration, and community-building.

Anne Marie Rooney is a poet and artist living in Baltimore. She is the author of No Beautiful and Spitshine, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press, as well as two chapbooks. Her poetry has been twice featured in the Best American Poetry anthology, and has been the recipient of the Iowa Review Award, the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, the Amy Award, the Freund Prize, and others. With the artist and game designer Sam Sheffield, she creates poetic games as LORRAINE. She hosts “Poem on the Radio,” a bi-weekly discussion of a single poem, on WGDR’s “Still Life with Club Soda.”

Julia Rooney is a visual artist based in New York City. Sensitive to the increasing power that digital, virtual, and augmented realities command, she creates paintings and site-specific installations grounded in real space, analog material, and the human body. Her work has been in solo and group exhibitions at Below Grand, Freight+Volume, Hesse Flatow, Band of Vices, Jennifer Terzian, Arts+Leisure, and Kopeikin, amidst others. She has been awarded residencies and grants through The Joan Mitchell Center, Yale University Art Gallery, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, More Art, The Studios at MASS MoCA, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, amidst others. She holds an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art.