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MICHAL ROVNER
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Born in 1957 in Tel Aviv, Michal Rovner studied cinema, television, photography, philosophy, and art. Since moving to New York in 1987, Rovner has seen her work shown extensively, including at The Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate Gallery, London; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York hosted a mid-career retrospective in the summer.
THE SPACE BETWEEN
By repeatedly re-photographing her images, transferring them from video to film and back again, and manipulating them digitally, Michal Rovner creates photographic and video imagery that abstract familiar subjects like houses, animals, and people into ambiguous and iconic forms. Working with representation but against the traditions of narrative and documentary purpose, her artworks imply a tentative universe, one that is paradoxically peaceful and unsettled, vivid and shrouded, and completely counter-factual. If the changing nature of art has resulted in a general blurring of boundaries–between painting and photography, reality and memory, presence and absence–Rovner mines this haziness, refuses to respect borders, and exists completely in The Space Between.f 2002.
THE FIELDS
Video artist Michal Rovner’s unique and ever-expanding alphabet is built of tiny depictions of the human figure. Fields documents her work in this vein over the past three years, including Data Zone, which combines the sculpture and video from her acclaimed solo exhibition in the 2003 Venice Biennale; documentation of the video installation Time Left; works from the project In Stone, including stone moving “texts;” and notebook vitrines. Her recent collaboration with the composer Heiner Goebbels, Fields of Fire, which was made following a trip to Kazakhstan, depicts oil-field fires in a landscape that recalls both the fluid ink brush of the Soong and T’ang dynasty and the hyperkinetic pen of the seismograph: the notion of landscape is transformed from the symbol of constancy to an engine of metamorphosis.