You Are Not Alone - by Rachel Lee Hovnanian (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian presented "Angels Listening" at the 59th Venice Biennale. The interactive exhibition featured seven large-scale bronze angels staged around a silver confessional box, each figure rendered in silence with its mouth "taped" shut.

For many years the artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian has been analyzing the drifts of our hyper-technological and hyper-connected society. She presented at the 59th Venice Biennale, Angels Listening, an interactive exhibition featuring seven large-scale bronze angels staged around a silver confessional box, each figure rendered in silence with its mouth "taped" shut.

Viewers were invited to participate by relinquishing their innermost thoughts, whether repressed due to fear of judgement or sheer inability, by writing them onto pieces of ribbon, placing these ribbons into The Cathartic Box, and ringing the awakening bell, a symbol of the role of the angels as mute listeners.

At the end of each day all of the new messages were compiled onto prayer-like mats and dispersed throughout the exterior gardens for future visitors to encounter and share as a collective stream-of-consciousness.

This book shares those messages. In listening to these stories, perhaps it is people who become the angels listening.

About the Author

Rachel Lee Hovnanian was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia and raised in Houston, Texas. She received her BFA from the University of Texas, Austin, and completed post graduate studies at the Parsons School of Design in New York. She lives and works between Miami, New York and Tuscany. 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.