Rachel Harrison (artist)

[12] In 1996, she had her first solo exhibition, titled Should home windows or shutters be required to withstand a direct hit from an eight-foot-long two-by-four shot from a cannon at 34 miles an hour, without creating a hole big enough to let through a three-inch sphere?, at Arena Gallery, New York.

Here Harrison covered the parlor of a Brooklyn brownstone with imitation-wood paneling, small sculptures, cans of peas, and photographs of green trash bags that came from a single contact sheet.

[13][14] The title of the show was taken from the first sentence of a news article the artist read about the politics of insurance codes and natural disasters, following the devastation of Hurricane Andrew in Florida.

The exhibition presented a series of 21 photographs that she took the previous year of an apparition of the Virgin Mary that allegedly manifested in the second-story window of a house in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, alongside installation components.

[21] For the critic John Kelsey, Harrison’s sculpture of this period “sets itself up as a sort of switching station where cultural materials and meanings are violently disconnected and recombined.”[22] The works in If I Did It were first shown in New York and then traveled to Migros Museum in Switzerland and Kunsthalle Nürnberg in Germany.

[24] For instance, in her 2012 exhibition The Help (which shared a title with a Hollywood movie), the pieces shown featured references to the Brian de Palma film Scarface and the singer Amy Winehouse, as well as to artists like Alice Neel, Pablo Picasso, and Marcel Duchamp.