Ilana Harris-Babou “Harris & Daughter Home Goods”

Recess

This event has ended.

Ilana Harris-Babou will begin work on Harris and Daughter Home Goods, a project that will transform Recess into a hardware store, cooking show set, showroom, and interrogation of the American Dream.

With the help of the artist’s mother, Sheila Harris, Harris-Babou will devote the duration of her Session to shooting a new video work on a film set that she will construct in the space. Throughout her Session, Sheila and Ilana will engage visitors as “special guests” in an ongoing video piece and enlist the public as participants in video tutorials informed by the aspirational logic of cooking and home improvement television programs. Guests will be considered experts on wall insulation, plumbing, and home appliances, disrupting conventional assertions of specialist knowledge.

In hijacking the language of home improvement television, Harris and Daughter Home Goods will invite visitors to participate in the creation of hypothetical domestic products that alternate between the glossy, the ephemeral, and the abject. Visitors will mold hybrid ceramic objects on site that verge on the productive and useless, questioning the ways in which consumer home products offer the promise of an ordered life through the possibility of an ordered home. Ilana is interested in how the artist’s studio might be analogous to other spaces of creation, such as the kitchen or toolshed. The project explores the ways we shape our identity by surrounding ourselves with what we have made.