Imagine a poem as a video, the flits and leaps of words and ideas taking visual form. Jibade-Khalil Huffman, a poet and visual artist, works across many media while challenging their boundaries, hierarchies, and traditional structures. His narratives forgo beginning, middle, and end, instead becoming endlessly layered and unfolding nonlinearly across a constellation of objects. 

With an almost cacophonous explosion of stimuli, Huffman creates a sense of estrangement, asking us to reassess our relationship to the images and text, and to question our assumptions of what they mean and how they function. In You Are Here, a story of reinvention is told through multiple perspectives. Huffman uses the phenomenon of parallax, or the perceived shift which occurs when an object is viewed from different positions. As we watch two women flip identities, the dualities explored within his work come to the fore: the real pushes against the virtual, and passive engagement against immersive engagement. 

Huffman’s videos and multimedia installations in essence become large-scale collages, the juxtaposition of disparate elements serving to recontextualize and give new meaning to each image, each line of text, and each sound. His work calls to mind both the installations of video pioneer Nam June Paik and the incisively political collages of Dada artist Hannah Höch, two seminal artists who challenged and changed our understanding of visual culture. Huffman similarly creates a sense of rupture, often calling attention to important questions.

Whose stories are told? How are they told? And what is our relationship to them?

Parallax Distance is supported by Utah Division of Arts & Museums, National Endowment for the Arts, Summit County RAP Tax, Summit County Restaurant Tax, Utah Office of Tourism, Rachel and Larry Gilbert, Susan and Glenn Rothman, and Julie and Bradley Senet.

Image Credit

Jibade-Khalil Huffman, You Are Here, 2021. Multi-channel video, color, and sound. Courtesy the artist and Anat Egbi, Los Angeles.