NYAB Event - Rachel Hovnanian "Too Good To Be True"

Rachel Hovnanian "Too Good To Be True"

This event has ended.
At Collette Blanchard Gallery
Media: Photography, Installation, Performance Art

The exhibition includes an installation, performances, and a selection of archival prints by multimedia artist Rachel Hovnanian. Hovnanian's work engages the politics of beauty with minimal forms that expose intricate relationships that humans have to one another and inanimate objects. Her minimalist palette is nearly completely devoid of color; gray shadows reveal the soft dimensionality of her sculpted installations. The seemingly pure, neutral palette used in her work contrasts, and thus emphasizes the disturbing, and complex nature of perceived beauty and its delimiting consequences. To quote the artist, her palette "imparts...the precursor to reflection." As such, it becomes impossible to avoid the tensions of dependence, decorum and control that pervade her work. In Hovnanian's print, "The Collector," a seated male, his back to the viewer, gazes at the items in his collection- one of which is a poised, life-size female trophy. Objectified to the extreme- literally a female sculpted as object- the figure is dressed as a beauty queen. Her colorless eyes and timid grin face the audience, lacking any particular direction of their own.

[Image: Rachel Hovnanian "Get Him to Forgive You" (2010) photograph in archival ink on rag paper 36 x 26 in.]