Ilana Harris-Babou

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Biography: Low Che Tung explores Traditional Mas characters derived from fragmented religion and sociocultural traditions of disparate peoples transplanted from their ancestral homelands to this island environment. She discusses her findings through conference and journal papers. My mixed media paintings have been shown in group shows in Andorra, Spain, China, South Korea, Switzerland, Haiti, Romania, Slovenia, the UK, the USA, Trinidad and Grenada.

Global Threads Article on the Work of Tara Keens-Douglas

In Tara Keens-Douglas’ hands, architecture adopts a new kind of weight. Her constructions cling to the body. She shapes a shifting space which transforms with the movements of the figure it adorns. In a series titled Ecstatic Spaces, KeensDouglas crafts costumes out of paper, rope, and other materials that adhere to neither the conventions of costume design, nor those of building construction. Her work’s great challenge, and its great triumph, can be found in the act of translation. Her costumes navigate the nuances, limitations, and epiphanies that come about when one seeks to shift from one mode of describing culture to another.

Her hybrid practice is rooted in both her academic and her biographical background. Ecstatic Spaces began in the classroom as a thesis in the Architecture Master’s Program at the University of Waterloo in Canada. Keens-Douglas is from Trinidad, and so the culture of her home became a natural source from which to cull inspiration. What better place to understand this tradition than in the transformative jubilance of Carnival? She embarked upon an architectural project which focused on the way in which Mas costumes might shape the surface of the body, and the space surrounding that body.

Before she caught her stride, Keens-Douglas says that she “was designing like a creative young person. But writing like a middle-aged white man.” By this phrase perhaps she means that the language surrounding the costumes she was making was not properly suited to the experience of encountering them visually or viscerally. In order for her ideas to be truly legible, they would have to carve out their own language from relevant fragments of the discourses surrounding her practice. And so, what began as “really academic” became the evidence of “a very personal experience.”

She found a personal voice when she began to allow the limitations of her hands to dictate her architectural construction. They are costumes, not models, and they are hand-made, built up bit by bit. The work eschews sterilized perfection and mechanized construction. In each piece there is a tension between the individual and the institution. Keens-Douglas notes that the costumes worn by the players in popular Mas bands are increasingly massproduced with cheap labor abroad. Her project had to be hand-made, because “Making [one’s own costume] makes it more real than [just] wearing it.” This offers a very particular perspective on the effects of globalization in the celebration of Carnival. Her costumes are made in Canada, a great distance away from Trinidad. But they can take the artist’s personal history with them. Their hand-made construction is a declaration that the notion of authenticity need not be tied exclusively to a singular national provenance.

By extending beyond personal and physical

boundaries, Keens-Doulas’ work asks the viewer to evaluate her own size in relationship to the world. To be a participant in Trinidad Carnival is to undergo a shift in scale. It is to expand beyond the boundaries of one’s own body and to become much larger than oneself. Famed “Mas Man” Peter Minshall describes this phenomenon by saying: “there is something else my work tries to be at its best, to inspire the ordinary man to say, ‘Look at me, look how much bigger I am than I was before I went into this thing!’” If people participate in Carnival so that they might become a part of something larger than themselves, then what exactly is this something, and how does one go about joining it? Keens-Douglas has found one answer to this question. For her, that something is a kind of popular body. It is body built with the architecture of conflicting intersecting dialogues: the personal & the global, weightiness & ephemerality, etc.

When speaking of the process behind the creation of her work, Keens-Douglas reports that she used “variously scaled ‘spikes’ to draw attention to areas of the body used to communicate, whether as threat device or sexual lure.” She allows the gestures of the body to speak to an individual’s social intent. The forms are non-verbal, yet still legible.

The “ecstasy” of Ecstatic Spaces can be found in the malleable surface where the body meets the surrounding world. In some ways, costume marks the boundary between carnal meaning and semiotic meaning. Ecstasy is hidden within, in this liminal zone. What is felt in the flesh becomes articulated by the movements of muscles. What is sensed is translated into what is “read” by the eye of another. Visual and tactile experience are unified. Costumes enhance the movement of the body while allowing this movement to be read with the specificity that might be expected of a text.

Two of Peter Minshall’s characters that can be compared to Keens-Douglas’ project are “Tan Tan” and “Saga Boy” from the 1990 band Tantana. Their giant silk bodies flutter wildly at the slightest movement of the much smaller human beings that bear their immense mass. They appear to be simultaneously weightless and gargantuan. We know that the movements of each character are an extension of the gestures of a single person. The performer is quite literally installed within the structure surrounding her. Keens-Douglas writes that her costumes “make a new “facade” or emphasize one already in play. They are, in a way, architecture of the persona.”

Each piece in her project is referred to as one of four operations: appropriation, exaggeration, submersion and sublimation. She says that each costume represents a “feeling” rather than a “character.” A character is a fully formed cultural entity. It is appearances paired with sometimes fixed sentiments. Her work loosens this pairing

short essays

in order to isolate visual artifacts that are given, from those which are mutable.

She writes that the works’ “significance lies in its affirmation of identity, while accommodating an emotional and sensuous experience.” This phrase sets up at least two distinct goals: to transcend the quotidian aspects of the body and to exist firmly within one’s own skin. When thinking about Mas one must consider whether these goals truly conflict with one another. In Ecstatic Spaces the viewer finds room for them to be complimentary. This is because the forms which make up the costumes evoke concepts which are much larger than their minimalist structure. They are built simply yet are infinitely complex in their meaning and origins. Of Mas costumes, Keens-Douglas writes “They are all tools of communication, a medium between body and space. Each transforms the body during carnival, through its disguise and extension. Together they produce an out of body experience.” The models wearing her costumes speak beyond their bodies, while simultaneously highlighting the silhouettes of their form.

The space surrounding the costumes is equally as important as the objects themselves. Keens-Douglas writes of carnival as an opportunity to actualize the “shadow self.” A shadow is the silhouette formed by the light we do not reflect. It is the negative space we carve out of that which is visible. It is the self we form by taking away from the architecture that has been given to us. According to the artist, carnival costumes “stand in for the bodies we do not have.” Negative space bears equal importance to constructed form in many of the works in Ecstatic Spaces. When the model lifts her arms, the jagged edges of paper frame the air around her. Material can inscribe the spaces where the body is not, and to lend these spaces their own particular yet fleeting content. The costume marks the boundaries or limitations of the figure as well as the figure’s strengths.

When describing contemporary Carnival, Keens-Douglas notes that the participant is, “no longer on a raised platform.” Mas bands, bystanders, and everyone in between move about on a level playing field, the Savannah. A platform implies a moment of respite from juxtaposition. It is the surface upon which we position that which is meant to be observed at a distance. When placed on a platform, an event appears isolated. It is implied that an event is above the fray: above everyday dissolutions of meaning. When on a stage, performance becomes a specimen to be observed, rather than a force to be swept up in.

Keens-Douglas’ works are simultaneously transcendent and tragically mortal. Some are made from fragile fibers like paper. Paper is not a common covering for the body; it is the surface of choice for written material. The viewer can see how Keens-Douglas’ work allows the academic or the esoteric to be imbued with a new kind of literacy. Gesture is articulated on paper, but not with the written word. Instead, paper speaks by taking flight from the gesticulations of the model.

Ecstatic Spaces appropriates culture on many levels: architectural, social, diagrammatic, and perhaps spiritual. But it does not merely mimic, it transforms by compounding

these dimensions into one surface. It enables each dimension to take on the meanings associated with the next. Keens-Douglas notes that “even the Savannah is an appropriated space.”

During most of the year, its grassy expanse is used for a variety of activities that have nothing to do with Carnival. It is taken over temporarily and its societal significance is shifted. Carnival is embodied for only two days before it disappears into the realm of memories, recordings, and preparations for the coming year. Keens-Douglas’ work appropriates both physical and conceptual space. It acknowledges the fleeting nature of these sorts of intersections. Of the experience of both her work and of Carnival, she says that one must be allowed to “throw it away at the end.”

Biography: Ilana Harris-Babou (born 1991) is an American sculptor and installation artist. Harris-Babou was born in Brooklyn, New York, and currently lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where her studio is located. Harris-Babou’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe, which was presented in tandem with her solo show Tasteful Interiors running from August 16 through November 5, 2021, at ICA @ UTC in Chattanooga, USA.