JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN

This exhibition continues Huffman’s long fascination with ‘the double,’ with doppelgängers, changing identities and “the second act of American lives.” This paraphrasing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, comes from the writer’s notes on his unfinished novel The Last Tycoon and refers to the idea of a reset or fresh start and the limitations of second chances. In this exhibition Huffman explores reinvention and ideas about what a change could possibly mean in the face of trauma via the construct of his video installation.

Considering the total installation and conventions of the viewing experience for video, You Are Here (2024, 55 minutes) and Subject (2022, 6 minutes) are projected continuously alongside Driver 4 (2024, continuous) an ever changing loop of multiple screens juxtaposed with different durations. Facing the central projection Huffman has arranged a discrete installation of car seats and monitors. The installation plays on the form of the arcade racing game. Asynchronous, the total-video installation in this gallery employs chance, where different combinations and image collisions may happen. Running counterpoint to the films in the darkened gallery_,_ Monodrama (2024, 18 minutes) utilizes found material, collaged into a rage filled stream of consciousness. A third film installation, Tondo (2024, continuous), utilises inkjet on Duratrans with a rear projected looping video.

Alongside his video works, the exhibition features new inkjet, fabric and screen print works (the first time the artist has worked with this material). Among these a suite of ten collages utilise a Harlem Globetrotter’s colouring book to explore various divisions through their encounter with residents of an Appalachian town. As ever, the inter-related framed images articulate something distinct that the moving images cannot. Similarly the application of wall vinyl functions to echo sentiments in the text but also graphically disrupt the installation of collages. Though elaborative, Huffman’s static works are never illustrative or literal in their relationship to his videos. Drawing from a non-exhaustive list of source material—from maps and diagrams, to classic television stills and advertisements, Huffman’s attention to poetic language and semiotics addresses how meaning is shaped and ever-changing.

The exhibition title references both the 2017 album “CTRL” by SZA, as well as the video game “Control,” (which also figures into Huffman’s ongoing research of, and works addressing, the participatory within the video installation space), in terms of their emotionality and confrontation with trauma, but also speaking to the introvert’s desire for control in the social space—and the artist’s own quests to control rage in the face of senseless death, threatening attempts at religious control, and the cadence of chaos pulsing through the world.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer whose video and photo works use found, archival material and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. Lyrical strophes of text and densely-composed imagery produce objects of perpetual flux, indexed by accumulating layers which challenge normative symbolic and semiotic hierarchies. Through projection and repetition, Huffman’s work evokes the untranslatable, ruminating on the liminal qualities of singular experiences through narrative and graphic rhythms.

Recent solo museum exhibitions include Brief Emotion, Frac Bretagne, Rennes, FR; You Are Here, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art Charleston, SC; and Now That I Can Dance, Tufts University Art Gallery, Tufts University, Medford, MA. Huffman’s work has also been exhibited at museums and institutions including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The High Line, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, MoCA Tucson, Swiss Institute New York, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, The Jewish Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Hammer Museum.

Huffman was educated at Bard College (BA), Brown University (MFA, Literary Arts), and USC (MFA, Studio Art), his awards include the Grolier Poetry Prize, the Jerome Foundation Travel Grant and fellowships from Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Lighthouse Works, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Huffman was a 2015-16 Artist in Residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work is in the permanent collections of Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Kadist, San Francisco, CA/Paris, FR; Pierce & Hill Harper Arts Foundation, Detroit, MI; Studio Museum in Harlem, Harlem, NY; and Tufts University Art Collection, Medford, MA. Huffman is an Assistant Professor at University of California, Irvine, where he teaches video and collage. He lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.