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Recently, Israeli photographer and video artist Michal Rovner was given a full-dress exhibition at the Whitney Museum. An entire floor was devoted to her video images and photographs of haunting, silhouetted figures, mostly of birds and men, engaged in crowded flight patterns or trudging through barren landscapes. Each of her creatures seems oddly alone, even in large groupings. Rovner’s camera gives them dignity in a theatrical sort of way.
Rovner’s work, the product of painstaking digital editing that whittles away recognizable individual traits from whatever living object she is filming, announces a new voice that is at home with abstraction and lyric beauty.
Rovner seems to be casting spareness and extreme individuality into a new system of socio-poetic art—an artfulness infused with a political sensibility stemming from her lifelong experiences with conflict in her native Middle East. The oddly shaped men in her videos, huddling, pacing, bowing on snowy hillsides, could be read as stand-ins for her countrymen imagined in a Utopian dance of quiet, yet profound reconciliation.
Rovner’s media art is like no other. She stands alone in the pure and artful way she bends digital technology to suit her own vision. She makes of these tools fine materials like the smoothest of marble or the supplest of paints.