When I meet her at her Bushwick studio, Rachel Lee Hovnanian does not strike me as a rebel. Polite, easygoing, tastefully dressed, she seems like an adult version of the child she once was, a self- described “good girl” who obeyed the rules.
“Happy Hour,” the artist’s current show at Leila Heller Gallery in New York, is all about breaking them. Or at least breaking their spell. Hovnanian’s work in this and other shows casts her as a sort of anthropologist, examining the world of her childhood in the South—Houston to be exact—for clues as to how we live now.