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Hovnanian’s multimedia exhibition HAPPY HOUR explores domestic culture and gender roles in relationship to alcoholism through a series of paintings, works on paper, and installations. Invoking the narrative style of Fun with Dick and Jane alongside iconography borrowed from Girl Scout and debutante traditions, this exhibition is a deep reflection of her childhood growing up in the south, and challenges the restrictions she experienced in her upbringing. Hovnanian uses her works in this series to show the conflicted complicit relationship between alcoholism and the domestic order, and pulls back the curtain on the numbness and silence in service of the status quo.
Throughout the series Hovnanian foreshadows her childhood of growing up in a household with an alcoholic father, where every hour was “happy hour.” Looking closely into the deeper layers of her canvases, viewers find clocks set precisely to five p.m., and school-girl scrawl detailing quotidian traumas, lightly veiled like the façade Hovnanian put on outside the doors of her own home. Within Hovnanian’s large-scale installation House of Empty Bottles, rows of shelves are filled with hundreds of empty liquor bottles, each one wrapped with a page torn from the 1947 Girl Scout Handbook. The pages become bottle labels; Hovnanian takes cues from the typed text to create her own counter-text, illustrated in watercolor and ink. With this installation, the artist creates another kind of survival guide - a verbal and visual handbook that is only now recorded in the form of these liquor labels.
