Michael Rovner: The Space Between
by: Wolf, Sylvia

Hardcover. New York, Whitney Museum of American Art/Steidl, 1st, 2002, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Flexible boards, 264 pages. B/w and color illustrations throughout. Published to accompany exhibition at Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Super clean. 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.