Light Shows
Benjamin Krusling, with S*an D. Henry-Smith, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, and Asiya Wadud
Organized with Triple Canopy
About the event
Join Triple Canopy and Wendy’s Subway for a reading by Benjamin Krusling, author of Glaring and “i have too much to hide,” with audio and video contributions from S*an D. Henry-Smith, Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, and Asiya Wadud.
Glaring, Krusling’s debut book of poems published by Wendy’s Subway, is concerned with reading domination and violence and entering their psychotic motion, the better to do otherwise. Through the thicket of anti-blackness, militarism, surveillance, impoverishment, and interpersonal abuse and violence, Glaring investigates the things that haunt daily life and make love difficult, possible, necessary.
In “i have too much to hide,” a series of poems published as a part of Triple Canopy’s twenty-sixth issue, Two Ears One Mouth, online streaming becomes a form of semantic delivery. The poems begin with the United States’ invasion of Iraq “in grainy green detail,” and are voiced by “an active speaker in / the building” who is interrupted (and sometimes thwarted) by the associations, references, and soundbites triggered by their speech. Eventually, the poems lose their shape and merge with the online ephemera that they index. In poems that are interwoven with unsolicited messages, as well as screenshots that track the speaker’s browsing history, Krusling explores how experience and phenomena are dominated by anti-Black imperial power and attempts to trouble the anxious, polluted streams of corporate digital space, in which algorithms deliver content based on a read of the user’s prior activity and shape how we experience ourselves and associate with others.
About the participants
S*an D. Henry-Smith is an artist and writer working primarily in poetry, photography, and performance, engaging Black experimentalisms and collaborative practices. They have received awards and fellowships from the Fulbright Program, The Poetry Project, Poets House, Antenna/Paper Machine, and have read, performed, and exhibited at Basilica Soundscape, Issue Project Room, Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and elsewhere. S*an’s words and photographs have appeared in Aperture PhotoBook Review, Apogee Journal, FACT, FLASH ART, Canadian Art, The New York Times, them, Triple Canopy, and across several book projects. They are the author of two chapbooks, Body Text and Flotsam Suite: A Strange & Precarious Life, or How We Chronicled the Little Disasters & I Won’t Leave the Dance Floor Til It’s Out of My System; as mouthfeel, they coauthored Consider the Tongue alongside Imani Elizabeth Jackson, which explores histories of aquatic labor and Black food through cooking, poetry, and ephemeral practices. Wild Peach is S*an’s first full-length collection.
Jibade-Khalil Huffman is an artist and writer whose video and photo works use found, archival material, and contemporary ephemera to address slippage in memory and language, particular to race and visibility. Lyrical strophes of text and densely-composed imagery produce objects of perpetual flux, indexed by accumulating layers which challenge normative symbolic and semiotic hierarchies. Through projection and repetition, Huffman’s work evokes the untranslatable, ruminating on the liminal qualities of singular experiences through narrative and graphic rhythms.
Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste (b. 1984, Baton Rouge, LA) is a New York-based artist considering notions of errant relations which thrive across subjectivities. Toussaint-Baptiste was a 2017 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room and received a Bessie Award in 2018 for Outstanding Music Composition and Sound Design. He is represented by Martos Gallery. Select exhibitions include: Inna, Martos Gallery, New York, NY (2020); Pendulum Music: An Arrangement for Four Performers and Geodisic Dome, MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2018); Evil Nigger: A Five Part Performance for Julius Eastman, The Kitchen, Brooklyn, NY (2018); Who Needs To Think When Your Feet Just Go, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (2016).
Asiya Wadud is the author of Crosslight for Youngbird, day pulls down the sky/ a filament in gold leaf (written with Okwui Okpokwasili), Syncope, and No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body. Her work has been supported by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Danspace Project, Mount Tremper Arts, the New York Public Library, and others. Recent work appears in e-flux journal, Social Text journal, BOMB Magazine, and Makhzin. She teaches poetry at Saint Ann’s School, Columbia University, and at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Partners
Triple Canopy is a magazine based in New York. Since 2007, Triple Canopy has advanced a model for publication that encompasses digital works of art and literature, public conversations, exhibitions, and books. This model hinges on the development of publishing systems that incorporate networked forms of production and circulation. Working closely with artists, writers, technologists, and designers, Triple Canopy produces projects that demand considered reading and viewing. Triple Canopy resists the atomization of culture and, through sustained inquiry and creative research, strives to enrich the public sphere. Triple Canopy is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and has been certified by W.A.G.E. A description of current issues can be found here.