Michal Rovner: 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.

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 Arts Center, New York; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Wshington, D.C.; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York hosts an exhibition of Rovner's work during summer 2002.