About the artwork:
Angela Lansbury’s prominence in this work is a personal reference for Huffman, owing to his grandmother’s devotion to Murder, She Wrote, a TV show in which Lansbury starred. Her image alongside a swirling collage of ads for television movies and other similar products functions as a reflection on the artist’s own navigation of various traumas. Lansbury stands in for someone solving such an investigation.
About the artist:
Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer who uses found, archival material, and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. Often working site-specifically, his work takes the form of installation, video, projections, photographic light boxes, and photo collages printed on layered transparencies and paper. Foregrounding the materiality of digital media and its degradation over time, Huffman’s approach dissolves explicit meaning in order to reconstitute it as objects in perpetual flux. Through projection and repetition, his work evokes the untranslatable, ruminating on the liminal qualities of singular experiences through the flattening of symbolic and semiotic hierarchies.
Exhibitions
Marfa, Ballroom Marfa, The Way You Make Me Feel, 2018
Huffman derives much of his practice from the intersection of writing, poetry, found media and common speech, often cutting, sampling and shifting bits of video and excerpts of text into new formats. The idea of erasure—of certain voices, people, and ideas—as subject matter and as technique is central to his practice, in building up and removing layers of material in his videos and two dimensional collages. While almost completely eliding language as a response to various traumas within this current body of work, Huffman continues to source his subject matter from an endless array of TV Guides, abstracted maps, classic television stills, icons of technology, charts, diagrams, staircases, tunnels, markers, indices, arrows, annotations, advertisements, often leaving only the stray and fleeting fragments of a phrase left to parse.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman’s recent solo institutional 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 Wexner Center for the Arts, Ballroom Marfa, The Kitchen, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 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 the Cafesjian Art Trust Museum, Shoreview, MN; 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.
Born in 1981 in Detroit, MI.
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.
