Beyond the Hedges
Rachel Lee Hovnanian
March 8 - 22, 2024
South Beach Robe, 2023
Ink, paper and acrylic on canvas
68 x 48 x 2 3/4 in (172.7 x 121.9 x 7 cm) Framed
COUNTY is pleased to present Beyond the Hedges, an exhibition of recent paintings by Rachel Lee Hovnanian. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at COUNTY.
Bright lime and avocado green hedges interpose themselves between cloudless skies and crystal blue swimming pools, simultaneously disrupting and enlivening scenes of domestic leisure. Hovnanian, who worked as an art director for Madison Avenue ad agencies before becoming a full-time artist, knows well the seductive power of images. In Beyond the Hedges, she constructs believable scenes from disparate sources, including old advertisements and family photos, bringing together people who never met and compressing timelines and geographies. She amalgamates multiple points-of-view, as Cézanne did in his still-lifes, creating perpetually unsettled compositions which teeter between perfection and dissolution.
Complementing these scenes of domestic life, Hovnanian presents paintings from her Robe series, such as South Beach Robe, Flamingo Pink Robe, and Poison Dart Robe, in which women’s robes are absorbed into various leafy or floral hedges. A direct feminist commentary on Jim Dine’s male robe paintings, Hovnanian’s Robes speak to the historic invisibility of women’s creativity and the undervaluing of labor, such as gardening, which has traditionally been gendered feminine. These works also point to camouflage and concealment as survival strategies, as implied by the use of “hedge” as a verb, which comes from the sixteenth-century phrase “hiding in the hedges.” As much as they sometimes inhibit interconnection, hedges provide spaces of safety and security, and the hedges in Hovnanian’s paintings may be interpreted multiple ways, including as metaphorical sites of creative flourishing.
Beyond the Hedges was inspired, in part, by the strangely alienating effects of the COVID lockdown, which coincided, for Hovnanian, with a geographical change. After spending most of her adult life in New York City, the artist moved into a new home in a Miami neighborhood where tall hedges separated her from her neighbors. The absence of visible people and the visual predominance of perfectly rectilinear hedges could not have felt more different from crowded New York had she crash-landed onto a lunar colony. Because of lockdown, it was impossible for her to meet her new neighbors, or even see them, apart from a few fleeting encounters with socially distanced, masked figures walking their dogs. Although her current series of paintings are not exclusively set in Miami, but rather combine elements from various locales, including Southern California, they capture the beauty and eeriness of her new home and her curiosity about what her unknown neighbors’ lives may be like on the other side of the hedges. Having grown up in a suburb of Houston, Texas, where an unusually high proportion of her classmates’ parents were astronauts, Hovnanian has always found the domestic sphere as fascinating as space travel.
In fact, we may know more about what lies beyond the stars than what happens in our neighbors’ backyards. Visually alluring and mysterious, Beyond the Hedges challenges us to imagine the universes of possibility that exist all around us, just beneath the surfaces of our everyday lives.
Rachel Lee Hovnanian is a contemporary artist whose multidisciplinary practice explores the complexities of modern feminism and new media technologies. In 2022, Hovnanian was selected to participate in the 59th Biennale di Venezia: The Milk of Dreams, where she presented Angel’s Listening (2022). Recently, Hovnanian's Mind the Body (2023) was selected for the 44th La Versiliana Festival: Of the Multiple Identities of the Body in Pietrasanta, Italy, and again for presentation within The Divine Feminine (2023-24) at the Ann Norton Museum and Sculpture Gardens in Palm Beach, Florida.
Over the last decade, Hovnanian’s work has been exhibited at public and private institutions across the globe, including numerous solo presentations in the United States, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. She received her BFA from the University of Texas, Austin, and completed postgraduate studies at the Parsons School of Design in New York. Hovnanian currently lives between Miami, New York, and Tuscany.
Logan R. Beitmen