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Entity interviews Rachel Lee Hovnanian to learn about her art, the future of technologu and women.

New York based feminist artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian uses her art to engage in deeply conflicted subjects. With a diverse range of materials and platforms, Hovnanian draws from her own experiences with the overconsumption of technology and media in today’s culture to produce pieces that speak to the masses.

Her concern with the advancement of technology, as well as the corresponding dependence on it for attention and gratification, manifests in her series, “Plastic Perfect,” candidly showing her audience what has become of people in the digital age. Another series, “Power & Burden of Beauty,” illustrates the idealistic yet impersonal standards of beauty that women find so unattainable.

Recently, the artist sat down with ENTITY to share more about her inspirational work, reflections on technology and personal experience with beauty culture.

ENTITY: Your work has an intricate balance between a sort of humor and serious consideration. How does your installation “Perfect Baby Showroom” reflect your view of the future of technology?

Rachel Lee Hovnanian: This is actually a very serious installation. I’ve been told that my “Perfect Baby Showroom” presents a destabilizing response in which the viewer experiences several emotions colliding at once. An objective of “Perfect Baby Showroom” is to engage the viewer in a communicative, intersubjective experience.

Perfect Baby Showroom_2014_Installation

“Perfect Baby Showroom” by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. Photo Courtsey of Rachel Lee Hovnanian.

All of my work, as a female artist, implies that there is tension between the fragility of life and technology. The viewer is crucial and constitutive to the work – without their response, there is no reflection.

Viewers become the object of the conversation as they are surrounded by babies lined up in these formally arranged lucite boxes. There is a constant power relationship between the visitors and the lucite-boxed babies. In silence, the babies lie lifeless – a dormant formal arrangement. The viewer enters the space to disrupt this formal arrangement by picking up the babies. The viewer is drawn to the tactile nature of the installation – they are instructed to use hand sanitizer, put on a lab coat and take pictures to post on Instagram adding another dimension to this intersubjective dialogue.

Initially, my “Perfect Babies” installation speaks straight away to the viewer. I believe there will be companies, in the future, set up to deliver perfect baby technology and I choose to draw people’s attention to the fragile possibilities. My “Perfect Babies” installation establishes an aesthetic experience. Who could argue with Albert Einstein: “If at first, the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”?

ENTITY: How would you characterize your feelings about technology and its advancements before and after you began creating artwork that addressed these concerns?

RLH: I felt it was important to take a hard look at the very nature of  distraction – technology providing a gratifying false mindfulness. I choose not to judge, however, I do attempt to explore our dependence on technology, and I question its effects on our human relationships.

The effects of digital technology on our culture are yet to be understood, but one thing we can observe is this loss of intimacy and individual isolation. I believe we are the new white lab mice, providing data for the marketing experts. We swipe our cards at the grocery store, they see what we’ve been buying and they figure out what we’ll want next. We are pretty well hemmed in by technology; once we adopt it, it’s hard to live without it.

Incidentally, that is why I chose white lab mice in some of my other work. The mice have something in common with the rows of “perfect babies”; they have been genetically manipulated.

ENTITY: Have you ever found yourself so wrapped up in your smartphone like the couples in “Plastic Perfect”? If so, has your art been therapeutic for you or helped you decrease your phone usage?

RLH: My husband and I are not like the couples in bed because we make an effort to unplug in our bedroom. I recently heard there’s even a new word for people that don’t take their tech devices to bed. They’re called “disconnectionists” and are defined as a people who advocate spending time away from online activities for mental, spiritual or sexual rejuvenation.

I confess, though, that I don’t leave home without my phone. It is very hard to unplug, and vacationing off the grid is almost impossible. Every morning on my way to my studio, I walk along New York’s High Line bumping into people because my eyes are fixed to my phone, reading the mass of emails received overnight.

Reviewing my messages incidentally sucks up so much time. I feel compelled to respond to every “urgent” email or text. But of course the messages just appear to be urgent – that is the trap. Only when I finally turn my attention to my art can I disappear fully into my “off the grid” creative life.

My family, by the way, claims that I am my installation, which gives me “tech- guilt.”

ENTITY: We read that when you were younger, your mother’s refusal to allow you to eat cereal caused you to eat an excess of it when you went to your friend’s house. Do you think that the same situation will happen with children whose parents prohibit them from having smartphones?

RLH: I don’t think our children can go without – do you? Safety reasons alone support giving our children cell phones to use. Technology is fully integrated into our children’s creative and social lives. But having said that, as a start and perhaps by example, we can insist on being present when we are alone together with our families.

ENTITY: Before we get into your female-focused art, what does your relationship with physical beauty look like, having spent ample time in two very different cultures from two different states: Texas and New York. Were there major effects on your perception of beauty from this transition?

RLH: When my father moved us to his home state of Texas away from New York, he told me to pay no attention to the beauty culture because it’s more important what you put in your head than what you look like. This is, of course, true but the pressure of beauty remains a universal issue. It exists in New York but perhaps there is a different set of aesthetics in New York than Texas.

But it doesn’t matter where you live. I show my work all over the world and have had panel discussions about this issue. It seems women worldwide cannot escape this constant pressure.

It is even worse now because we have become a visual society. Look at how quickly we scroll through social media and [see] all the “likes” that the most “beautiful” receive. And there are many definitions of “beautiful” as well!

ENTITY: You approach the idea of self-image in two distinct yet perhaps similar ways. The couples in bed on their smartphones deal with a sort of ignorant narcissism, while “Fun House Dressing Room” engages an insecurity with oneself. Do you think there’s a relationship between narcissism and insecurity when it comes to self-image? How do you think one’s interaction with technology like the smartphone affects self-image?

RLH: The idea of getting sucked into the screens of our phones and tablets should serve as a warning. We walk the streets, ride the subways and drive cars immersed in our phones and tablets and we don’t “stop to smell the flowers” or interact with others if only with a friendly smile. We live in a world that’s all about “me.”

One of the most powerful ways in which technology is altering self-identity is through the shift from being internally to externally driven. Social factors seem to have an impact on the formation of self-identity.  But now, the latest technological advances have taken that influence and turned the volume all the way up.

Our popular culture manufactures “identity brands” of who our culture wants us to be. Tapping into our most basic needs to feel good about ourselves, popular culture tells us what we should believe about each other. The problem is that the self-identity that is shaped by popular culture serves its own best interests rather than what is best for us. Additionally, self-identity is no longer self-identity (derived from the self), but rather is an identity projected onto us by popular culture and in no way is an accurate reflection of who we really are. And we don’t realize this is happening to us as it chips away at our true self.

There are two really sad things about the unintended consequences of the use of these emerging technologies. First, most people have no idea of the dramatic changes that are occurring slowly within them. Second, this shift in identity from internally derived to externally driven can’t be good for us as individuals and, if you agree, it can’t be good for our society. And to top it off there is a generation of children born into this culture that have never experienced anything but life with technology.

ENTITY: “Beauty Queen Totem” is particularly interesting because, by calling it a “totem” and creating it to be such a massive piece (almost as if it should be worshiped since the audience has to physically look up at and to it), there exists a sort of spirituality with the sculpture. Do you think that women have a religious relationship to beauty?

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“Beauty Totem Pole” by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. Photo Courtsey of Rachel Lee Hovnanian.

RLH: I created this work and felt that it thematically anchored my show “Power & Burden of Beauty.” My “Beauty Queen Totem” – which stands some eleven feet tall on a victory platform – is suggestive of the top of a wedding cake. The “Beauty” is crowned, gowned and sashed on her trophy; she is a beauty contest winner and she is immediately recognizable, looking perfect and at the same time distorted and perfectly wrong.

Her posture, the stony blankness in her anonymous gaze, her exaggerated leggy, high-busted slimness resembles the all-American model fashion drawing . She appears to be stranded in victory, her arms full of roses. She is devoid of personal identity. Her crown is a blank headpiece formed around a single narcissus bloom. She appears paralyzed and frozen but that’s what our culture seems to want in a perfect beauty winner.

ENTITY: “Size 0,” like the majority of your pieces in “Power & Burden of Beauty,” has a very sterile, delicate, stark, white and polished look to it. How is the color and physical appearance of these pieces associated with American culture’s idea of beauty?

"Size Zero" by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. Photo Courtesy of Rachel Lee Hovnanian.

“Size Zero” by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. Photo Courtesy of Rachel Lee Hovnanian.

RLH: In our American culture, we glorify beauty, competition and sex. Stark whiteness polished to perfection becomes a beautiful sleek distortion. The stone coldness signals the impermanence of beauty and the inevitability of decay. Icy, preserved forever.

ENTITY: It’s interesting to view swimsuits/lingerie as armor as you’ve done in “Body Armor” and “Bronze Body Armor.” Why do you think of this clothing in that way?

RLH: My “Body Armor” sculpture is a large, hollow, exaggerated body shape (55 x 28 x 20 ft.), strangely sexualized and rock-hard rigid in the form of a bathing suit stuck on top of a pole. Immaculate, yet impossibly sexy, it seems to beckon alluringly while warning the viewer to keep away. The sculpture dares to stand up to evaluative eyes and the consequences of their positive or negative appraisals.

"Bronze Body Armor" by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. Photo Courtesy of Rachel Lee Hovnanian.

“Bronze Body Armor” by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. Photo Courtesy of Rachel Lee Hovnanian.

"Body Armor" by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. Photo Courtesy of Rachel Lee Hovnanian.

“Body Armor” by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. Photo Courtesy of Rachel Lee Hovnanian.

Hovnanian’s work is a series of bold messages about the problems she sees in today’s culture. She uses the “absurdity” of her art to deliver powerful messages about how the technology trend has shaped the new generation – people are now, more than ever, attached to their devices. With her work, she asks her audience, “When was the last time you unplugged?” Additionally, Hovnanian shines an exposing light on how technology, beauty ideals and societal norms have shaped women to become both narcissistic and insecure and powerful and burdened.

To learn more about Rachel Lee Hovnanian and view her art collections, visit her website here.

Edited by Ellena Kilgallon
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