Multi-media Artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian’s, The Women’s Trilogy Project, is no one-off show. Rather, it is an expansive three part exhibition in which each installation plays off the last’s themes and energy. Raised in Texas, Hovnanian draws on her Southern background to question cultural values and PURE is no exception. Through a series of interactive installations and marble sculptures, Hovnanian aims to dissect social constructs of consumerism and societal pressures.
In her previous shows at Leila Heiler Gallery, where the take over has taken place, Rachel has not failed to wow, and for the last shabang, PURE, we experienced nothing short of the same cunning ability to question intangible concepts with tanglible materials. PART III of The Women’s Trilogy Project, PURE is the final deliverance of this ambitious three-part installment, and we have been delivered.
PURE will be on view June 7 to July 21 at Leila Heller Gallery, located at 568 West 25th Street.
‘Predicament escape’, a term usually associated with magic escapology, involves aspects of the damsel in distress archetype when performed by a female artist, with the difference being that the damsel takes charge of her own fate as opposed to waiting for a hero to come to her aid. Beaudemont places her name among other powerful female figures who, despite the limitations bestowed upon them because of their gender, not only escaped but transended their predicaments to cement their spots in the annalls of history.
Creating an enclosed space evocative of a prison, the artist challenges and subverts this female archetype paradoxically through her embracement of the archetype itself, a bold reclamation that lends this piece it’s rhetorical potency.
Currently, we are wishing we could escape the bleak predicament that is America to catch this show. Do us a favor and go instead. Head back to our office interview with the artist to hear more about her fantasy life in the 1800s, what gets her out of bed, and much, much more.
Peter Paquin has a term he likes to use. He’s not sure where it's from or if he made it up. “Misanthropologist” combines two terms: misanthrope meaning “hater of mankind” and anthropologist. What Paquin wants the viewers of his first solo show to know is that he doesn't actually hate humankind— It's just that he's painfully aware of human ignorance. To Paquin, the show and its message is ”more about humans being their own worst enemy.“
So if it's about humans, why rats? Paquin has been using rats as an icon for decades since he first began tagging them in the late 90’s. What Verman shows us, other than Paquin's popularity in the art world, is the ability for iconography to hold many layers of meaning: "what it boils down to is having a subject that I can use as an image and just do variations on. And the image also loses meaning if that makes sense. But while also having this incredibly heavy meaning, in the opposite regard, it becomes extremely abstract.”
While it may not be a premonition exactly, Verman points out the ironic ways humans degrade ourselves. We try so hard not to see the waste that we create and the vermin that live on that waste. But like many other things in life, it's the things that we try so desperately to make invisible that becomes so detrimental to us because of the ways we allow them to mutate and fester without accountability. Ironically, it's exactly this aggressive neglect of the filth that we have created that makes it so potently fatal. By forcing us to look at this and experience “the rat” as we have made him, Peter Paquin may have a hand in stopping this vicious cycle, but I suppose it's up to us in the end.
Verman by Peter Paquin is currently on view at Procell, 5 Delancey St, NY, NY.
