Touch Detection | Ilana Harris-Babou

Exploring the gulf between our corporeal realities and the aspirational lifestyles marketed to us by the wellness industry and the home décor market among other sectors, Touch Detection inserts pathos and humor into objects otherwise intended to facilitate a seamless and streamlined existence. Customizing mirrored video screens, smart light fixtures, occasional tables and tesserae, Harris Babou transforms these signifiers of modern refinement with ceramic objects and moving images to cultivate tactile reflections on 21st century life.

A series of small ceramic wall reliefs draw on the inherent tension between the sleek design of Instagram-worthy spaces and the realities of our bodies. Riffing on bathroom design trends, Harris-Babou composes framed mosaics embedded with glazed ceramic objects impressed alternately with fingerprints and the ubiquitous swipe gesture used to operate digital touchscreens. By objectifying the gesture we use to navigate interfaces between the physical and virtual world, Touch Detection illuminates the etymological roots of the word ‘digital,’ questioning what world, exactly, is at our fingertips. 

Evoking medicine cabinets, the artist’s video works in the gallery are presented on customized mirrored screens. Often a repository of secrets, needs, and desires, Harris-Babou brings this tension to the cabinet’s surface, coopting the technology of smart fitness mirrors to layer viewers’ reflections with images of ambiguous foamy, soapy substances that ooze, drip, and splash. Our tangled relationships between desire and repression, human sensibilities and manufactured ideals, are further emphasized in the artist’s tabletop installations. Displayed on minimalist side tables, Harris-Babou’s ceramic sculptures are based on Kong toys – a type of rubber dog toy built to conceal a treat – whose stacked, bulbous shape alludes to modernist sculpture. Glazed in fleshy tones or pops of color, and variously whole, torn, and deflated, they are containers of desire that represent all the challenges to its attainment.

About the Artist:

Ilana Harris-Babou’s work has been exhibited throughout the US and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Needy Machines at Candice Madey and Under My Feet at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. In May 2023, Harris Babou's video installation Liquid Gold took over the screens of Times Square for the Midnight Moment program. She has been included in the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020) and The Whitney Biennial (2019). Harris-Babou’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Wellcome Collection (London), and Electronic Arts Intermix. Her exhibitions have been reviewed in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Artforum, e-flux, Sculpture Magazine, and Art in America, among others.

Gallery Hours:
Wed-Sat 12-5pm