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Tuesday, April 10, 2012

Vision To Visuals: Keeping It Real

Rachel Hovnanian challenges perceptions of female beauty

This Article Features Photo Zoom

Mud Pie, Hovnanian's upcoming show at the Leila Heller Gallery in New York, opens in May. The solo show includes large-scale installations, sculpture, mixed-media paintings, photography and four short films created by Hovnanian. We printed Deep Matte Digital-C prints of her "hyper-abundant floral arrangement" images called "Fake Flowers Dining Room" and "Fake Flowers Living Room."

Elaborating on the theme of this solo exhibition, she says, "Mud Pie explores the blurring of reality and the narcissistic side of digital life. The viewer is invited into my dream/awake state as I identify commonplace sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and views of my early childhood in Texas. I ask everyone to imagine a young girl making mud pies in the backyard swallowed up in the world of make believe. I recall vividly the smell of pie in my mother's kitchen, which triggers a powerful memory—but is it apple or mud? And my memory of a profusion of fresh flowers—real or is this more cultural taxidermy? I often think it took a digital revolution to overwhelm the mythic purity of both a child's mud pie and a kitchen-baked, factory-fresh American apple pie and that we need to recall our own mud pie to preserve our earliest origins. We seem to have forgotten what is real. Fast food chains replaced cafes; children think a package of pink powder mixed with water is real lemonade made with freshly squeezed pink lemons. We think we have 1,000 real friends on Facebook. We are sucked into our screens and can't find the time to separate from technology. Only when the power is down, or if we are visiting a remote place with no wireless, can we take a break."

Seven years ago, Duggal printed Hovnanian's photograph "Santori" for a body of work entitled Preservation of the Narcissus. The fine-art giclée print gave her the quality, color, richness and scale that she wanted. Ever since then, she has become more like family to Duggal than a client. Referring to our special relationship, Hovnanian wrote to me to say, "An artist needs to develop trust in the team. It's an odd situation because you have an idea and you puzzle through many stages and at some point one's vision appears and you hear and feel your own voice. When I walk into Duggal, I say hello to Rosie. Duggal has many women working for them. I work with Monica Drew who is a mother, a wife and a daughter, and balances her career and does all of this well. We connect on all of those levels, and she and the other women understand my work. It is so important to have support as well as production skill. Duggal provides me a feeling of safety because they produce quality, meet projected deadlines and have yet to disappoint."

It's a true honor for Duggal to work with artists like Rachel Hovnanian, the real soothsayers and healers of our era.

For more information on Duggal, visit www.duggal.com or check out the new blog at www.duggal.com/connect and see their newest articles on the printing, photography and fine-art industries.