Ronan Day-Lewis: Anemoia

Megan Mulrooney is pleased to present Anemoia, an exhibition of new paintings by artist and filmmaker Ronan Day-Lewis on view from September 13 – November 1, 2025.

The title of Day-Lewis’s new body of work is a neologism referring to the phenomenon of “nostalgia for a time or place one has never known” (Wiktionary); a peculiar sort of longing shaped entirely by images. The term is a fitting frame for a series of paintings that draw from the detritus of early 2000s American visual culture, where collective memory collapses into the artist’s personal reverie. Day-Lewis sources many of his images through a process he calls “Flickr mining,” trawling the forgotten corners of the once-popular website for washed-out, orphaned uploads taken on early digital cameras. Conjuring these photographs in a new medium is both an exercise in and a meditation on nostalgia – but it is also an act of necromancy.

Day-Lewis’s works are haunted by the aesthetics of mass culture and its flotsam – fairy lights, balloon bouquets – where the optimistic consumerism of the new millennium has gone to rot. Here, a figure greets an apocalyptic storm with a smirk, and an exurban home becomes a site of the occult. Time feels out of joint as we wade in and out of images that once belonged to someone else’s memory, now materialized into something far stranger. The resulting aesthetic is a kind of obliterative Americana, where dread and dreams commingle in scenes of spectacle and leisure.

Day-Lewis paints like a filmmaker, constructing each image as if it’s a single frame loaded with narrative possibility, and the exhibition as a whole with the logic of montage. His compositions operate like jump cuts, inviting the viewer to assemble their own associations from painterly fragments. His technique deepens this cinematic pull. Working in oil pastel on raw canvas, Day-Lewis scumbles pigment into a granular, almost staticky surface that recalls the degraded textures of VHS tapes, a blue-hazy scuzz where edges bleed and colors ghost across the picture plane. Light feels artificial and unstable, like supernatural glares caught on a cheap lens. There’s a sense, always, of watching something over, your face pressed up to the crackling static of an old CRT.

Throughout, Anemoia considers what it means to inherit a visual memory that isn’t ours, to live amid images whose contexts have been lost but whose emotional charge remains. The works also invite us to look forward rather than back. What will our own digital archives - the infinite scroll of 2025, 2035, and beyond – feel like when they’re encountered by future audiences? Any image, however provisional and unstudied, is a seed of future longing.

Ronan Day-Lewis (b. 1998, New York; lives and works in New York City) is a painter and filmmaker who holds a BA in Art from Yale University. He has exhibited with D.D.D.D. Pictures, New York; WOAW Gallery, Hong Kong; and Palo Gallery, New York. His debut film, Anemone, premieres September 28th at the New York Film Festival, and will receive a wide theatrical release from Focus Features on October 3rd.