Michal Rovner: Untitled/Night, 2016

With glowing eyes, a jackal peers from the Façade of the Gardner Museum, where it stands sentinel. For months, world-renowned video artist Michal Rovner listened to the nightly howls of these nocturnal creatures in the hills around her home. Their presence frightened her, but she ventured into the dark again and again, hoping to capture them with a night-vision camera. One evening, a jackal emerged from the bushes and looked directly at her. In meeting its eyes, Rovner felt she was looking at something more than an animal, rather an unearthly force—ancient and knowing, strange yet familiar. She was reminded of Anubis, the jackal-headed god of Egyptian mythology, protector of souls traveling to the afterlife. The video-still print of the guardian-like creature on the Gardner's Anne H. Fitzpatrick Façade represents one iteration of Israeli American artist Michal Rovner's series _Night_, which depicts the jackals that dwell on the liminal spaces near her farm. Across the image, tiny figures seem to move under and through the jackal's watchful gaze, protected in their ethereal journey. Through these animals, Rovner asks us to turn our own eyes to the timeless human universality of belonging and otherness, fear and perseverance.