Constitutive Outside

Constitutive Outside
On View October 22—December 13, 2026 

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 22, 2026 
6:00–8:00 pm 

Constitutive Outside brings together works by Markele Cullins, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Steffani Jemison, and Rindon Johnson. Across performance, installation, and screen space, the exhibition examines how subjectivity emerges through misrecognition, non-coincidence, and the limits of representation. This group exhibition stages visibility and signification as contingent and ongoing practices rather than fixed individuations, troubling prominent notions of the relationship between representation and subjectivity. Through the interaction of performance and media, this exhibition explores artistic strategies formed in response to the negativity of signification for the overdetermined subject, and how the blind spot within the field of the visible might arrest the closure of meaning. Taken together, the works in this show stage a reevaluation of suture and gaze, questioning their status as the operations that bind the subject to representation by concealing lack. Visitors will navigate a space of screens, embodied installations, and spatialized viewing situations that turn the gaze into an ongoing negotiation rather than a position of mastery.

Organized by Tarik Garrett, ‘26 CCVA Curatorial Research Fellow.  

Markele Cullins is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Cullins received a BFA in Intermedia from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and an MFA in New Genres from UCLA. Using installation, photography, performance, mixed media, text, and experimental filmmaking, they ask questions about the human condition through play, experimentation, and embodied research. Cullins creates work through a self-created system that engages the four cornerstones of contemplation, catharsis, action, and grief.

Cullins has shown work at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Human Resources, Los Angeles; Mirror Lab, Minneapolis; and the Athens Biennale, Athens.

Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer whose work spans photography, video, writing, installation, and video games. His practice examines depiction and spectatorship under conditions of media overload, with particular attention to memory, language, race, and visibility. Huffman’s work has been presented at The Kitchen, New York; Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; FRAC Bretagne, Rennes, France; and the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, Charleston, South Carolina, among other venues. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine.

Steffani Jemison is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. In dialogue with interlocutors living and ancestral, her work connects mark-making, gesture, proposal, projection, movement, and document. Steffani Jemison has presented solo exhibitions and commissioned performances at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris; CAC Genève, Geneva; JOAN Los Angeles, Los Angeles; Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Jeu de Paume, Paris; CAPC Bordeaux, Bordeaux; MoMA, New York; LAXART, Los Angeles, and other venues. Significant group exhibitions include New Humans, New Museum, New York; Flight Into Egypt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York; and the Whitney Biennial, New York. Steffani Jemison’s work is part of many public collections, including the MoMA, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Castello di Rivoli, Turin; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Her novella A Rock, A River, A Street was published by Primary Information in 2022; she has also written for Artforum and The Brooklyn Rail.

Rindon Johnson is a multidisciplinary artist and writer working across sculpture, video, virtual and augmented reality, poetry, and installation. Johnson examines how language structures personal and collective realities. Grounded in a gender- and race-critical perspective, his work considers captivity, value, ecology, and extraction through materials and environments that move between the physical and the digital. Johnson has presented solo exhibitions at Kunsthall Bergen, Bergen, Norway; Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; CC Strombeek, Brussels; Chisenhale Gallery, London; the Albertinum, Dresden; SculptureCenter, Long Island City, New York; François Ghebaly, New York and Los Angeles; and the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf. Significant group exhibitions include Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Biennale di Venezia, Venice; Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Biennial, New York; Poetics of Encryption, KW, Berlin; Worldbuilding: Gaming and Art in the Digital Age, Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf; Lifes, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Accumulation, Second Sequence, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich; and Emotional Terrains of Change, Simian, Copenhagen.