You can criticize something by ripping it apart in an angry and resentful way; or you can also do it more elegantly and with a pinch of humor as Ilana Harris-Babou does. The interdisciplinary artist producing sculptures, installations and videos, has often employed irony to look at painful realities or at the contradictions of the American dream.
For example, one of her past projects, entitled "Reparation Hardware" (2018) moved from luxury design, trendy interior pieces and clothes to ponder on the legacy of disenfranchisement hidden within the aesthetic of the upscale American home-furnishings company.
The company's promotional videos on YouTube may look at labor, value, and inheritance tied to restoring materials such as old wood, but in her project Harris-Babou explored these values linking them to historical injustices like the fact that, post-Civil War, formerly enslaved people were allowed just forty acres and a mule, dismantling in this way the grandiosity of the original videos.
The project becomes therefore a way to go beyond parody and shed light on the struggle of Black Americans who navigate a society that often reduces them to mere objects despite their resilience and resourcefulness. This particular project also questions the alignment of social justice with consumerism, raising a dilemma on whether wealth or buying power alone can serve as a form of reparation. Black Americans have faced systematic denial of inheritance, which causes an understandable yearning for luxury or fashionable and trendy products.
Yet Harris-Babou goes beyond this point challenging the notion that wealth or purchasing power alone can't rectify historical injustices and absolve consumers from the guilt they may be feeling about a variety of issues - from climate change to slavery. In brief, design falsely promises redemption. There is a twist in this project: despite facing relentless attempts to reduce them to mere objects, Black Americans have managed to create value and meaning from seemingly nothing, exposing a failure of the American dream.
In another project, "Decision Fatigue" (2020) the artist looked at cooking shows, self-improvement, design, and the beauty industry. To prepare for this project Harris-Babou attended The Class, a fitness workshop promoted by Gwyneth Paltrow and her lifestyle brand Goop. She then proceeded to turn a gallery into a mock boutique with a pink front wall reminiscent of Glossier's flagship store, with ceramics of skincare products, soap dishes, jade rollers, and yoni eggs on display. Resin "soaps" included surprising elements like car air fresheners and Cheeto puffs; the latter were also turned into the miracle ingredient of a surreal makeup tutorial for a face mask featuring, Harris-Babou's mother, Sheila.
While the beauty and wellness industries provide ample material for satire, Harris-Babou approaches her critique with humor, gentleness, and a non-judgmental stance.
A new project at Storefront for Architecture will continue along this path, but also explore childhood memories and reinterpret the playful rituals embedded in the streetscapes of Central Brooklyn.
"Under My Feet" (October 7th - December 16th) moves from the artist's own experiences of growing up in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, East Flatbush, and Crown Heights - predominantly African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and West Indian immigrant neighborhoods. While reimagining the sounds, colors and textures of these areas, Harris-Babou reconstructs her sense of home and belonging in this project.
The exhibition yearns for the innocence of childhood, of games played on the sidewalks - hopping over cracks, sitting on cellar gates under bodegas, enjoying music, and contemplating the vibrant signs above. But it also tackles intimacy and dispossession, adding an architectural element to the theme and conceiving the key locations of the neighborhood as a protective environment.
"Under My Feet" is a way to acknowledge and reconnect with a fading landscape of freedom and support amidst gentrification and displacement, but, through it, Harris-Babou also explores the future possibilities ingrained in the sidewalks and storefronts of Nostrand Avenue, Church Avenue, and Flatbush Avenue, so that the gallery becomes the locus where intergenerational businesses and independent retail establishments - hubs of liberating pedagogies for Afro-diasporic imaginations - can be celebrated.
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