Ilana Harris-Babou and Pallavi Sen: Mise-en-scène

Ilana Harris-Babou and Pallavi Sen: Mise-en-scène

Mise-en-scène | Cafe Coffee Day | Press Release | Installation View

September 10-October 19, 2022
Opening Reception and Reading: September 10, 7-9pm
Cafe Coffee Day: October 1, 10am-2pm

Open Source Gallery presents Mise-en-scène, a collaborative installation by Pallavi Sen and Ilana Harris-Babou.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term mise-en-scène as “the setting, surroundings, or background of any event or action.” Pallavi Sen and Ilana Harris-Babou lived together as roommates during the first pandemic lockdown in 2020. Their home became a stage, a classroom; a space for cooking, recording, and dreaming. Intensified by both a swelling cultural interest in the placement of objects in homes (via magazines, books, digests, and the internet at large) and an extended period working at home, the artists shaped their lived spaces through the dual vision of a sculptor and a renter, individually and together.

Mise-en-scène will expand the work they began together during lockdown, exploring the home as the background setting for the magic and messiness of everyday life. Sen builds installations, printmaking, textiles, and intuitive, musical movement. Her work (through various materials) circles around planting gardens and meadows, inner lives of birds and animals, the grief of the anthropocene, domestic architecture, atheism and magical thinking, pattern histories, friendship + love, her future lover, work spaces, work tables, eco-feminism, love poems, the gates to Indian homes, walking, seeds, and twice daily cooking.

Harris-Babou’s work is interdisciplinary; spanning sculpture, installation, and video. She speaks the aspirational language of consumer culture and uses humor as a means to digest painful realities. Her work confronts the contradictions of the American Dream: the ever unreliable notion that hard work will lead to upward mobility and economic freedom.

In both artists’ work, no element of domestic space is taken for granted. Mise-en-scène will place their textiles, ceramics, collages, furniture, tools, and more in unexpected and playful combinations.

Pallavi Sen received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University. She is the Assistant Professor of Multiples + Distributed Art at Williams College. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Shandaken Projects, Mildred’s Lane, Ox-Bow, ACRE, and the Yale Norfolk School of Art, among others. She is the author of Dead Planet Cookbook published by GenderFail.

Ilana Harris-Babou received her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been shown at The Museum of Arts and Design (NY), The Studio Museum in Harlem (NY), CCA Wattis Institute (CA), Kunsthaus Hamburg (Germany) and the Queens Museum (NY) among many others. She has participated in residency programs at Triangle Arts Foundation, Pioneer Works, Whitney Museum Education Department, and Recess Art among others.