Constitutive Outside

Opening Reception: Thursday, October 22, 2026

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, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts' 2026 Curatorial Research Fellow.