Selected by Lynn Hershman Leeson
For Juliana Huxtable the Internet and social media are essential outlets in which to explore the wildest reaches of communication. She embarks on endless escapades and forages mutable identities and community combines in work that reflects a shifting gendered space of being; a Tumblr-ised, mutiplatform arena for collaged rap and visual rapture that includes those precious elements normally discarded. At the heart of her excavations, Huxtable unearths a longing for the castoffs and normally throwaway meta-garbage. This becomes the saviour, the underlying spine of a generational culture that speaks a multiversed language of provocation. The MOMA and Performa commission There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed (2015) melds samurai-sword-wielding protagonists and an intersexed body scanned into recycled trauma. The vulnerable trash and delusional self-history becomes this generation’s shameless ‘other’. The outages and depth of outrageous filters rewards through the creation of seminal trans-craftings that are original and often breathtaking.
Juliana Huxtable is a Texas-born, New York-based, poet, artist and DJ. She attended Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, where she studied art, gender studies, and human rights.
This article was first published in the January & February 2016 issue of ArtReview.
