Ilana Harris-Babou

CANDICE MADEY is pleased to announce the gallery’s first solo exhibition of Ilana Harris-Babou, Needy Machines, at the gallery’s 1 Rivington Street location. The exhibition presents a new body of video and sculpture that explores the emotional and physiological entanglement of wellness marketing, AI-powered smart homes, and consumer product design on perceptions of self and metrics of health. Through her work, Harris-Babou playfully undermines the visual vocabulary of high tech and luxury décor, further addressing the limitations of design to resolve the messy business of caring for the body.

In a new series of wall-based sculptures, short and suggestive videos play behind smart mirrors, their scale suggesting the form of a medicine cabinet. A visual and aural mix – including ambient meditation music, health advice written as poetic text, urgent calls for emotional support, and CAPTCHA imagery – offers ambiguous and contradictory instructions to the viewer who is implicated in the reflective surface of the mirrored screen. Harris-Babou questions what defines healthy in today’s environment, particularly for women and minority communities. The videos probe whether networked appliances and digital applications can promote intelligent choices for health and well-being, and how these “smart’ and interactive machines increasingly live alongside us in intimate spaces of the home.

An adjacent series of wall-based sculptures echo bathroom tiles and shelving, however, their normally uniformed patterns are interrupted with hand-made ceramic and resin shapes that mimic beauty products, food waste, and “swipe” gestures.

In Needy Machines, the appearance of fleshy and organic forms set within high-end design speaks to the tension between a culture that prescribes technology for any imperfection or ailment, and the lived, fallible experience of maintaining our physical selves. The work also continues Harris-Babou’s ongoing examination of the ways in which private enterprise benefits from the lack of adequate social welfare in America and the outsized influence of the wellness industry on notions of self.

Ilana Harris-Babou’s work is interdisciplinary, spanning sculpture, installation, and video. She currently has a solo exhibition at The Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York that explores childhood memories of her Central Brooklyn upbringing. She has exhibited throughout the US and Europe, with solo exhibitions at The Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University (2023); Artspace New Haven (2022); Kunsthaus Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany (2021); Institute of Contemporary Art Chattanooga (2021); and she was included in the Istanbul Design Biennial, Turkey (2020) and The Whitney Biennial at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019). Group exhibitions include The Wellcome Collection, London, UK; California College of the Arts Wattis Institute, San Francisco; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield; SculptureCenter, New York, USA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA; The Queens Museum; New York, USA; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark; West Space, Melbourne, Australia; Gallery Miroslav Kraljević, Zagreb, Croatia; and Warehouse421, Abu Dhabi, UAE.

Harris-Babou lives and works in Brooklyn and Middletown, CT, and holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Yale University.

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