Multimedia artist Michal Rovner to present Malloy Lecture April 16

Artist Michal Rovner, known for creating edgy works of photography, video, and film that have generated critical acclaim on several continents, will present this spring's Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture at Skidmore.

The illustrated talk is scheduled at 5:30 p.m. Monday, April 16, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall. Admission is free and open to the public. Skidmore's Department of Art and Art History is sponsor of the event.

Rovner lives and works in Israel and in New York City, where she has had a studio since 1988. She has more than 40 solo exhibitions to her credit, including a one-woman show in 2005 at the Jeu de Paume in Paris. Jacques Mandelbaum, writing in Le Monde, noted, "Michal Rovner's exhibition elicits a rare feeling: the sense of making a fresh discovery. This internationally acclaimed artist has produced strange and original works, delicate in their roughness and right off the beaten art track."

Among her more notable works is the 2003 piece titled Data Zone. In it, miniature people march aimlessly in lines that cut across each other, fall apart, and merge. Rover projected this footage into 25 Petri dishes placed in a stark white laboratory-like environment. Resembling strings of bacteria, the faceless characters wander across their specimen dishes, ghost-like and shadowy in appearance. Rover has stripped the characters of their identity, deleted their backgrounds, and put humanity itself under a microscope.

Her major solo exhibitions include Michal Rovner: In Stone, in 2004 at Pace Wildenstein, N.Y.; Against Order? Against Disorder?, showcased at the Israeli Pavilion at the 50th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, 2003; and Michael Rovner: The Space Between, a 2002 mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Rover's site-specific video installations include Living Landscape (2002) a permanent 12-meter high video wall at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem; Overhang (2002), at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York City; Untitled Paris 2003 (2004) at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Films by Rovner that have been screened at international locations include Notes (2001), a collaboration with composer Philip Glass, at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York and the Barbican Theater, London. 

Born in Tel Aviv in 1957, Rovner studied photography in Jerusalem before moving to New York in 1987. She earned a BFA degree at the Bezalel Academy of Art in Israel and studied movies and TV from 1979 to 1981 at Tel-Aviv University.

Artist Susan Rabinowitz Malloy earned a B.S. in art from Skidmore in 1945. Her work has appeared in numerous group and solo shows in New York and Connecticut. In 1991 Malloy endowed Skidmore with the Malloy Visiting Artist Lecture series, which annually brings to campus distinguished contemporary artists of international stature.