Having seen images of this show in advance and having read the press release, I imagined the recent show of Ilana Harris-Babou sculptures, called Needy Machines, at CANDICE MADEY, to be a less sensual experience than the experience I had. First, I always love to see an exhibition in a small gallery—one that’s tucked away in a downtown building, with a small sign on the buzzer, that you could easily pass by if you did not know to stop in. Further, when a show is this good, I feel a sense of joy that I have found something special that might elude the uninformed passerby. When I reached the gallery and stepped into the entryway, before I could see any work, I heard the flushing of a toilet, which I assumed was just a funny and strangely loud but totally incidental sound in the building. When I realized it was part of the show, I furled my brow a bit that my first experience at this show was this sound. I came to realize, however, that the sound broke a tension I brought with me. I was prepared for something that felt more clinical and icier than the show actually felt when I was in it, having read that the exhibition “…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.”

The toilet sounds came from one of the five video works in the show, all of which consist of images that appear and vanish on screens behind mirrors that constantly insert the viewer into the artwork. In this particular piece, Needy Machine, the viewer is primarily shown documents seemingly pertaining to an insurance claim. The documents appear one at a time, each appearing only briefly. You do not have enough time to read the document before it vanishes. Each document takes up only a small fraction of the surface area of the work and appears on a different spot so that you are constantly moving your eyes and adjusting your focus. A hazy narrative starts to form. It is vague, but it is enough to evoke a pit in the stomach of anyone who has dealt with the denial of an insurance claim or with a medical bill for which one has no insurance. The initially awkward toilet sound became ominous.

 

 

 

In another video work, Tender Turing 1, small grids of thematically related images appear arbitrarily on the mirror;. One was images of corn; one was views of a pizza place; one was a combination of cut fruit and bodily details. The video evoked lifestyle magazines as well as those puzzles you must complete on websites to prove you are not a robot. It was elegant to watch these appear on the black mirror in its blushing cream-colored frame.

Striking, in an altogether different way, were a pair of video works, Foaming Mouth 1 and Foaming Mouth 2, in which the mirrored quality took on a more haunting aspect. Here, the viewer sees their reflection suddenly covered with a soapy foam that drips away and vanishes. It is a simple gesture made by the artist, but it is fascinating to watch one’s own sudsy face on the wall and then adjust focus to see just the suds themselves, then find yourself pulled back to your own visage again. Rarely is one’s relationship to a piece of art so immediately and intimately reflected back.

 

 

 

 

Harris-Babou takes us in a new direction, away from video, with two quite spare and startlingly narrative shelf-like sculptures. Both were long shallow shelves covered in a one-inch grid tile that evokes a steam room or sauna. They feel like aged luxury, something that at one time was new and chic but is now functional, but out of style. The first, Blush Tilt, was covered in white- and blush-colored tiles that gave way to a solid yellow at one end. On the shelf were two small, rough, and matte ceramic objects. One was a ceramic sculpture of one half of a pill bottle, and the other was a ceramic version of a textile of some sort.

The second shelf sculpture, White Ledge, was a white shelf which held a single pair of ceramic scissors glazed in a putrid green and pink swirl. The scissors were a beautifully horrifying object. Their placement was not one that suggested the tidy returning of an object where it belonged, rather it felt as though the scissors were placed there incidentally, in the immediacy of some other act that required their use. These two shelves together evoked something haunted and disturbing. Who took the pills; who used the scissors and for what?

 

 

The third component of the show was a series of wall sculptures that were roughly the same size as the video/mirrors and made from the same materials as the shelves. These wall sculptures, felt like paintings to me. The works each consist of a wooden frame filled with a rough, uneven grout that surrounds fields of the kind of ceramic mosaic tile, that one could find at any large chain home improvement store. The humble nature of these tile fields was juxtaposed by the insertion of exquisite little ceramic elements made by the artist. For example in Penny 1, a black frame contains a grid of black penny tiles held in place by black and white grout which forms a design evocative of a Holstein-Friesian cow. Harris-Babou breaks the field with three elements: the pointy end of a blue/black corn cob, something that looks like a potato chip, and what the press release calls a “swipe.”

The swipes are genius. They are roughly oval shaped mounds of clay with indentations that convey the trace of a finger or fingers that have swiped through it, as one would swipe across the surface of their phone’s screen. They appear in all five of the works from this series. In the aforementioned work, the swipe is a dark watery brown and evokes a mussel or abalone. In another work, Rind, one swipe is a coral color and ear-like in shape, another is pale green and is cracked and pointy. These are nestled into a field of white penny tiles and sand-colored grout. There is also a slice of citrus and a section of citrus rind. A fifth element, a small dot with a finger sized divet in it is also found. Is this a tap?

 

 

 

 

After viewing the show, something was stuck in my craw. The exhibition was very smart and a joy to look at. The use of materials was inventive and inspired. Combining the sleek video works with the tactility of the ceramic pieces created an unexpected tension that was reconciled by emphasizing comparable scale and placement. I did feel, however, that the overall elegance of the show was slightly undermined by the way the videos were installed. They were all placed near an electrical outlet—which makes obvious sense. But the plastic cord hiders left an unappealing tinge on the show. I think, in an ideal scenario, the cords and all would have been hidden in the wall. If this was not possible, I think a better option could have been found. The installation did not look like a choice made by an artist, rather it looked like a choice dictated by a person at the hardware store, without regard to the beauty of the work. If the cords had to be visible, could they have not been styled beautifully, in a way that strengthened the installation, a long luxurious fabric cord that swanned its way to the outlet? Then I wondered if I was placing too much expectation on the presentation of a thing, and not appreciating the thing itself enough. Was questioning this expectation something the artist was trying to make me do? If so, she succeeded; if not, she still has a success on her hands.

 

 

Paul Moreno is an artist, designer, and writer working in Brooklyn, New York. He is a founder and organizer of the New York Queer Zine Fair. His work can be found on Instagram @bathedinafterthought. He is the New York City editor of the New Art Examiner.