Walk down the street in any metropolitan city and you’ll likely find someone, many in fact, who are talking into their phones, abruptly breaking in-and-out of character as if their digital lives take precedent over reality. This premise serves as one of the central focuses of American artist and writer Jibade-Khalil Huffman. Born in Detroit and currently based in Los Angeles, Huffman is currently exhibiting a new solo exhibition entitled Control at Anat Ebgi gallery, revealing a new series of film installations, inkjet collages and his first-ever screen-printed works.
Huffman has long been fascinated with doppelgängers and reinvention in the face of trauma. Using today’s social and political climate as his subject matter, IRL features two performers, who over the course of three hours, act out a faux rehearsal against rotating sets and lighting with live and pre-recorded audio. As a live film performance within a film, the meta installation explores the nature of our digital lives today — periodically breaking in moments of monologue, to reflect when a character in a musical suddenly bursts into song or how a person can construct an alternate existence online.
Further into the gallery, Monodrama (2024, 18 minutes) mirrors the endless stream of information that inundate an average social media feed, presenting found material that Huffman collaged into a “rage filled stream of consciousness,” wrote a release by Anat Ebgi. “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 gallery added.
Control will be on view in LA until November 16, 2024.
Anat Ebgi
6150 Wilshire Boulevard
Los Angeles, CA. 90048
