Fondation

DHC/ART is pleased to present Particles of Reality, the first solo exhibition in Canada of the celebrated Israeli artist Michal Rovner, who divides her time between New York City and a farm in Israel.

Deploying painstaking digital marks to create highly lyrical languages, Michal Rovner’s layered and intentionally ambiguous work touches on the processes of historical documentation, archaeology, science and choreography to activate states of probing reverie in the viewer.

Developed in close collaboration with the artist and straddling two sites, DHC/ART’s presentation of sculptures and video evokes a natural history museum display in the main building, while a series of video installations occupy the satellite space.

The exhibition features key works including Data Zone (2003), a group of long tables embedded with illuminated Petri dishes in which silent clusters of abstracted figures, which form and reform, evoke laboratory cultures. In Stone (2004) and Stones(2006-2009) merge light with stone, combining the ancient and the modern, where archaeology is animated by quietly moving imagery, recalling hieroglyphs, petroglyphs and cave paintings. Finally, a series of mesmerizing video installations Order, More and Culture Plate #7 (ALL 2003) featuring emblematic, anonymous figures in patterns, culminates in the monumental Time Left (2002), a grand opera of isolation and connection, in which row upon row of human figures forming a vast wall text in motion, endlessly march across the entire perimeter of a room to an unknowable destination.

The exhibition is complemented by continuous screenings of Border (2000), a Kafkaesque, “fictional” documentary shot on the highly charged Israel/Lebanon border that muses on the ultimate validity of such an arbitrary designation, while attempting to locate and cross it; and The Making of Makom (2008), a video charting the construction of a sculptural project where the artist gathers and annotates, as in an archaeological dig, 60 tons of building stones from the remains of Palestinian and Israeli houses to build a deceptively simple structure.