When a friend dared Jeff Rovner to submit a few of his photographs to the Festival of Arts, the Laguna Beach resident expected the jury to reject his entry.

But to his surprise, his work was accepted, soft launching a second career that has taken him from photographing circus performers to creating art about artificial intelligence, invention and the ideas hidden behind everyday objects.

Rovner’s layered photographs mix composed images with patent illustrations, computer code and other conceptual material printed on clear plexiglass. A vintage watch hangs beneath a layer of patent drawings. A toy car is paired with the computer code behind self-driving vehicles. In his work, familiar objects become entry points into larger, often invisible ideas.

Seems like a fitting path for an artist who, until fairly recently, never thought of himself as one.

“For the first 59 years of my life, I would never in a million years have described myself as an artist,” Rovner said. “I wouldn’t have said I had any talent in art, and I absolutely would never have said I’m a fine artist.”

His journey started through photography as a hobby. In the mid-1990s, Rovner’s daughter, Haley, joined an all-kids humanitarian circus troupe based in Los Angeles. A hula-hooper and hoop dancer, Haley traveled with the troupe as it performed at venues including the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood and a Nobel Peace Prize concert in Oslo.

Rovner became the group’s unofficial photographer, documenting the young performers as they trained and performed. Wanting to create something lasting for the children and their families, he made a book that incorporated performance shots with portraits of each troupe member demonstrating the skill they loved most.

And after a friend challenged him to enter several of those circus portraits in the Festival of Arts in 2017, the rest, they say, is history.

“It’s like the dog that catches the car,” Rovner said. “Now what do I do?”

The acceptance sent him into a crash course on the practical side of exhibiting art: print sizes, frames, paper, pricing and how to speak with visitors about his work. Fellow Festival of Arts artists helped him find his footing, and he was invited back the following year.

But Rovner said he still felt unsure of where he belonged among artists who had spent their lives painting, sculpting and studying art. His first follow-up series, a darker look at circus life, did not connect with festival visitors. When he replaced it midway through the summer with photographs of monks and monasteries from a trip to Myanmar, the response improved.

The experience pushed him to consider what was actually personal and distinctive in his work.

Before becoming an artist, Rovner spent 14 years practicing law. In 1996, he left a law firm partnership to work in knowledge management and technology, helping organizations turn complex information and routine legal work into more efficient systems. The work was cerebral and rooted in the manipulation of concepts, policies and data.

That intellectual life eventually became the missing ingredient in his art.

“I had never done any art before, and while I love beauty and beautiful imagery, it was a very small part of my life,” he said. “The bigger part of my life was abstractions and concepts, ideas.”

In 2019, Rovner found a way to bring those worlds together through a series on machine-learning artificial intelligence, at a time when AI was more associated with recommendation engines and medical imaging than generative chatbots.

He photographed colorful vintage toys, pairing each with actual open-source Python code related to an AI category. A toy car represented self-driving vehicles. A fortune teller stood in for the predictive systems used by online retailers. Other pieces addressed robotics, cognitive medicine, space exploration and missile defense.

The code was printed on plexiglass and placed over the photographs, casting shadows across the image beneath.

“The conceptual layer and the art layer needed to be separate from each other,” Rovner said. “Something that’s just a concept doesn’t appear to you anywhere in the world. The car appears, but the concept doesn’t. What better way to display an invisible concept than as a shadow?”

The series earned Rovner an invite to speak at a United Nations artificial intelligence conference in Geneva, where he met scientists and technologists who embraced his link between playfulness, imagination and innovation.

After exhausting the AI categories he wanted to explore, Rovner said he turned to patents. His current work features objects associated with inventions patented at least a century ago, paired with the original patent material. He picks items with “gravitas and patina,” then rearranges pieces of the patent drawing into a composition that complements the photograph rather than covering it.

The works are issued in editions of 10 and share consistent dimensions and framing, allowing collectors to build their own sets over time.

Rovner said he’s still interested in new conceptual directions, including genetics and surveillance technology. But for now, the patent work offers what he was looking for when he first walked into the Festival of Arts: a form of art that feels fully his own.

Now retired from law and technology, Rovner serves on the Festival of Arts board and devotes his time to his artwork. More information is available at www.jeffrovner.com. His Concept Companion learning cards, developed from his interest in making complex ideas easier to understand, are available at www.conceptcompanion.com.