Artworks

MOTHERBOARDS

First presented within Hovnanian’s 2012 exhibition Mud Pie, the Motherboard series continues the artist’s exploration of the blurring of reality as a result of technological advancement. The exhibition posits that individuals constantly revise memories, editing and reinterpreting them to fit the narrative of our invented identities - identities that, at their core, were first encoded in the sights, sounds, and smells of early childhood.

This series of large-scale, planar sculptures are created with thousands of narcissus flowers cast in metal alloy and affixed to industrial steel in magnified riffs on the computer motherboard. In a computer, the motherboard connects to every process, including the main memory. Any memories accessed in these works are hardly of organic flowers that reveal their ephemeral beauty and then die. Much like computer parts, these flowers will never wither and die. The virtual memory of a computer motherboard bears little resemblance to our subjective lived memories. Therefore, the memory preserved in the Motherboards is only peripherally attached to real events.

Motherboard III, 2011