Michal Rovner: Untitled/Night, 2016
Michal Rovner’s *Untitled/Night, 2016* presents a glowing-eyed jackal as a watchful guardian on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade. The work draws on Rovner’s encounters with jackals near her farm in Israel, where she listened to their nighttime howls and repeatedly ventured into the darkness with a night-vision camera. After one jackal emerged and met her gaze, she associated the animal with Anubis, the jackal-headed Egyptian deity who protects souls traveling to the afterlife.
The façade installation is one iteration of Rovner’s *Night* series, which depicts jackals inhabiting the uncertain spaces around her farm. Tiny figures appear to move beneath and through the animal’s gaze, suggesting an ethereal journey and a sense of protection. Through the jackal, Rovner considers belonging and otherness, fear and perseverance, and the shared human search for meaning across time.
Artist: Michal Rovner is an Israeli American multimedia artist whose practice includes video, projection, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Her meditative works explore nature, identity, collective memory, and the fragility of human existence. By obscuring details that would identify a specific time or place, she creates layered works that connect past and present.
Artist Background: Rovner has been the subject of more than 70 solo exhibitions, including a 2002 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and a three-part 2011 exhibition at the Musée du Louvre. Her public commissions include projects in Naples, London, Jerusalem, and Seoul, and her work is held by institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the British Museum, and the Israel Museum. She studied cinema, television, and philosophy at Tel Aviv University and the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, and lives and works between New York City and Kfar Shmuel, Israel.
Medium: Video-still print installed on the museum’s façade.
Tickets: Price not available.