Artist Blog 11/16

3/11 Portfolio III, Photograph, Nadine Rovner

What initially drew me to Nadine Rovner’s work was her Portfolio III series. The slight blur and shifty movement of her subject matter coupled with the odd shape of her images and the hazy periphery around what’s visible is intriguing and I could imagine myself creating images like this. While the subject matter in some of these images throws me, I find myself more attracted to -and interactive with- her aesthetic. Her lack of quality lighting and interruptive focus makes me want to dig deeper; to find out exactly what I’m being shown and the meaning behind it. I find myself wrapped up in the fringes between the ghosts of objects that aren’t quite “there,” and the haze of light that contradictorily interrupts the space.

At first I didn’t have a clue as to what’s going on and I was okay with that. I thought the mystery is what makes them. I viewed this series as a sequence of thought or perhaps the strange linear narrative of a dream; in the greater scheme of things they make perfect sense. But after looking at them further, I realized that I’m annoyed and excited at the same time. Excited and in awe of her ability to create such an atmosphere and to capture her subject matter so poetically, yet annoyed that I may be missing something. Perhaps what’s happening is that I can read too deep into her images and that there aren’t enough possibilities. I have no issue relating these images to dreams. Though, like a dream, it only makes sense to the dreamer.

I worry my work is limited in a way that it is rendered almost inaccessible and will only be taken at face value. While the moth is personal to me, I do think that it is something that needs to be communicated to the viewer as I think its counterpart, the butterfly, suggests something entirely different. Looking through Rovner’s work has encouraged me to consider more seriously how I am taking my images and what certain subject matter suggests. I’m also inspired and intrigued by the dreamlike quality of focus and light in her work and I will strive to push my aesthetic further and explore other avenues for creating memory-like spaces.

Portfolio III

Nadine Rovner Website