JIBADE-KHALIL HUFFMAN
Poems For Every Occasion
August 18 - December 2, 2018
Curated by Joey Yates
Interdisciplinary artist Jibade-Khalil Huffman builds on a foundation rooted in poetry, synthesizing traditional and contemporary linguistic forms into a creative practice that employs multimedia platforms including videos, photographs, performances, and text-based works.
Poems For Every Occasion features recent videos and digital-based collages using Huffman’s personal archive of constructed images, text, and sounds, combined with an exhaustive database of pop culture material. In an era where daily life is mediated through our screens, Huffman’s work reveals the effects of a media-saturated environment on the American imagination, and transforms the ideas and aesthetics of mass communication into a socially informed artistic practice.
His inkjet prints recall the fractured décollage posters and other cut-up techniques of 20th century radical abstraction. His video mash-ups are like visual mix-tapes that tap into a collective psyche and communal sense of nostalgia. Digital screen-made textures of aggregated visual layers, pictorial exchanges, and abstract color fields work to rebuild the formal relationships between text, image, and sound into sophisticated video poems on personal history and American culture. Ultimately, his work aims to disarm our familiarity with visual and language-based structures.
Poems For Every Occasion is made possible by: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
About the artist:
Jibade-Khalil Huffman (b. 1981, Detroit) lives and works in New York City. After receiving his BA from Bard College in 2003 and his MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University in 2005, he went on to receive a MFA from the Roski School of Fine Art at USC in 2013. Driven by an archival impulse, Huffman creates poems, photographs, installations and videos using his personal collection of constructed images, texts and sounds, combined with an exhaustive database of pop culture material, highlighting an artistic practice that is both personal memoir and commentary on the fractured character of the American collective memory.
In addition to his work as an artist he is widely known for his poetry, Notable works include “19 Names For Our Band” (2008) and “Sleeper Hold” (2015), both published by Fence Books, as well as “James Brown is Dead” published by Future Plan and Program in 2011. Huffman was an artist-in-residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2015-16 and was included in the 2014 Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum. He has presented work internationally at institutions including MoMA/PS1, New York; MOCA, Los Angeles and MOCA, Detroit; Swiss Institute, New York; The Jewish Museum; Atlanta Contemporary; Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR. Huffman has exhibited work in solo and group shows at galleries including Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; LACE, Los Angeles; LAXART, Los Angeles; Marianne Boesky East, New York; China Art Objects, Los Angeles and Night Gallery, Los Angeles. He is represented by Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles.
