Ilana Harris-Babou

Ilana Harris-Babou is a multimedia artist whose video works are an important component of a practice that includes sculpture and object making, performance, and installation. In her projects, Harris-Babou mines the aesthetics of YouTube tutorials, home improvement and cooking shows, and corporate ad campaigns to call attention to how personal and social identities are constructed—and co-opted—by dominant ideologies.

Harris-Babou unsettles the anodyne tone of these vehicles with wit and creative whimsy, utilizing and re-contextualizing mainstream media forms to make explicit the forces that are elided by slick production strategies: social stratification; legacies of structured oppression; and the homogenizing push of consumerism. Fit within a history of artists using satire and mimicry to critique media and communication platforms, Harris-Babou’s videos, many of which feature her own mother, also draw from her personal experience and lexicon of references to infuse her humor with deeply resonant meaning.   full biography