Essex Flowers is thrilled to participate in Barely Fair’s sixth edition with an installation featuring ceramic sculptures by Aaron Krach, cyanotype paintings by Julia Rooney, and a site-specific floor and wall painting by Emmy Thelander. For the context of the international miniature art fair, the artists produced work at a 1:12 scale for a booth measuring 20 x 20 x 12 inches.

Appropriating visual vocabularies of scientific data, information graphics, and adolescent notebooks, Emmy Thelander diagrams daily routines. Her site-specific egg tempera painting—inspired by the psychedelic marble renderings by Filippo Lippi and Fra Angelico—covers the floor and walls of the booth, creating an immersive environment for Krach's and Rooney's work. The installation focuses on texture and taste: layered gestures that build dimension over time like geological formations.

Julia Rooney combines painting with the analog photographic process of cyanotype to play with the slippery boundaries between the two mediums. Scattered and stacked across the walls of the booth are twenty 2x2-inch cyanotype paintings whose imagery suggests everything from bodily organs, to microscopic life to celestial forms. The works are produced from hand-painted 35mm slides made by Rooney, which she then prints as cyanotypes and selectively paints over using gouache and oil paint.

Aaron Krach is an artist who makes work from the stuff of everyday life—vodka, plants, old sympathy cards, decoy owls. Installed on the floor of the booth are three ceramic sculptures imprinted with the words And More, Again and Always. The vases are made from slabs of clay pressed into wood for texture, and then combined into shapes inspired by stone, petrified wood, and bonsai trees.

Aaron Krach creates work that continually evolves, utilizing accessible materials and existing distribution methods. He holds a BA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, and an MFA from Purchase College, NY. He is a two-time recipient of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Grant for Public Art. He has mounted solo projects in New York (CLAMP, Essex Flowers), Pennsylvania (Buck Hill Falls), and Dallas, TX (The Reading Room). His artist books are included in the library collections of major museums such as MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum, and MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona). In 2023, he established @ND to produce experimental collaborative publications. Born in Michigan and raised in Southern California, he currently resides and works in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn. Mr. Krach currently instructs in art and design at Pratt Institute.

Emmy Thelander’s paintings, drawings, and installations reconstitute the structures of everyday life. She received her MFA in Painting & Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2014 and a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2010. She has been awarded fellowships including the Lighthouse Works, the Fountainhead at Virginia Commonwealth University, and the Alice Kimball English Traveling Grant in addition to residencies at Casa Lü, The Alex Brown Foundation, ACRE, Signal Culture, Osage Arts Community, and the Yale/Norfolk Summer School of Art. She has exhibited solo projects at Practice (Philadelphia, PA), Los Ojos (Brooklyn, NY), In The Pines (Jackson, WY), and Reynolds Gallery (Richmond, VA) and two-person exhibitions at Fjord (Philadelphia) and Hungryman Gallery (San Francisco). In 2018 she was the Herndon Smith Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis and is now Assistant Professor of Painting at Binghamton University, SUNY.

Julia Rooney (b. 1989, New York, NY) is a painter who plays with the increasingly porous boundaries between real space and digital space. She has had solo and two-person shows at Queen Projects (Bellingham, WA), Freight+Volume (New York, NY), Below Grand (New York, NY), Essex Flowers (New York, NY), Band of Vices (Los Angeles, CA), and Jennifer Terzian (Litchfield, CT), among others. She has received fellowships and residencies from The Joan Mitchell Center, Yale University Art Gallery, The Rema Hort Mann Foundation, More Art, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and MASS MoCA. Rooney received her BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art. In addition to her studio practice, she works as a Teaching Artist at the Museum of Modern Art, The High Line, and institutions throughout New York.