Samuel Freeman is pleased to present The Four People You Meet at Every Drug Deal, a solo exhibition by Jibade-Khalil Huffman. Huffman
will present a multimedia exhibition comprised of a 3-channel video and
sculptural installation, a multi-channel slide work, a color and
text-based video, and still life photographs. The exhibition will take
place throughout the entire gallery.
Huffman is an accomplished storyteller working in a variety of narrative systems. In his poetry-based writings, Huffman
has been recognized for his experimentation in syntax and style, while
conveying a poignant, youthful sense of ‘what it means to be here, now’ –
existentially, socially, culturally, and aesthetically. Using history
or certain traditions as a ground from which to deviate, Huffman
brings “seemingly disparate subjects and objects into association
without submitting to the ever-present temptation of over-determining
their relationship… And the poems certainly do deviate.” In his book
19 Names for Our Band, “sentences don’t so much unfold as they do
morph. Often, a sentence will travel the entire length of a page more
like a quickly-shifting river suddenly supplied with too much rain
water, than a canal flowing through its pre-dug course.” Yet even with
all his associative and syntactical shifts and jolts, “one can always
follow the richness of the music.” (Brett Price, Octopus Magazine #11)
In his most recent work, Huffman
explores both language and image-based structures, colliding
poetry—whether written or performed—with the underlying, pre-ordained
structures of cinema, photography, and other mediated forms of
communication. Infrastructural systems found in filmmaking, including
title sequences, credits and musical cues, are coopted by Huffman
as new sites or prompts for a more complicated narrative or aesthetic.
‘Catalogs of gestures’ such as zooms or flickering cuts are, in effect,
performed in parallel by Huffman’s
psychologically-charged protagonists, or are seen reverberating through
the marked editing of his photographic still lifes, lending to an
always-shifting sense of place and memory, an aesthetic of the edit, an
element of the absurd, and an appeal for heightened perception.
At the center of the exhibition, Huffman presents a newly expanded version of Lake Overturn,
originally a 1-night live performance and video screening presented
recently in a Hollywood industry screening room as a part of Pacific
Standard Time Presents... Both the film and live performance star
Claire Titelman as a location scout whose emotional collapse is told
through the imagery of formulaic Hollywood disaster films – ‘the only
language she has left’. As it plays out over the course of several
days, Titelman’s location scout—performing improvisationally both inside
the film and in front of it—ventures in and out of potential movie
sites, contradicting and confirming any sense of place or time.
Huffman’s new Lake Overturn incorporates
a voice-over narration by Titelman’s character, additional video
channels, a built construction with hung photographs, and newly shot
locations within Los Angeles domestic interiors, further exploring the
tension between ‘the frightening banality of the potential for disaster,
and the poetic banality of the everyday’. Huffman undercuts this binary, yet again, through a stream of contradictions found within the text and soundtrack.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman (Detroit, 1981) is the author of two books of poems, 19 Names For Our Band (Fence, 2008) and James Brown is Dead (Future Plan and Program, 2011) as well as a forthcoming book, Sleeper Hold
(Fence, 2014). His art and writing projects, spanning photography,
video, performance and poetry, have been exhibited and performed at
MoMA/PS1, Mt. Tremper Arts, and Scaramouche, New York; Machine Project,
Public Fiction, Night Gallery, and Eighth Veil, Los Angeles; and
Southern Exposure, San Francisco. His work was recently included in the
anthology The &Now Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing
(Northwestern University Press, 2013). A graduate of Bard College and
Brown University, he holds an MFA from the University of Southern
California, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
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