FIGURE/GROUND: ABSTRACTION AND OBJECT MATTER IN KEVIN JEROME EVERSON’S ARTMAKING PRACTICE (2022)
May June July (2021) 5:19, b&w. Still. Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures
Introduction
liquid blackness is pleased to present an informal teach-in on Kevin Jerome Everson’s work to prepare for his upcoming visit to the College of the Arts, Georgia State University. Everson is the inaugural COTA Ferrer Visiting Artist and will be giving an artist talk on March 25, at 2:00pm in GSU’s Kopleff Recital Hall, 15 Gilmer St SE, Atlanta, GA 30303.
Kevin Everson is a multimedia artist, whose work spans sculpture, photography, and film. His impressive filmography includes over two-hundred feature length and short films (as of 2022) and deliberately, yet playfully, defies categorization. With each film, the artist attempts to work out a formal problem, one that most often originates from his relationship to art practice and art history rather than film history. Indeed, Everson’s unprecedented output is inspired by the idea of creating a “body of work,” as a painter, a photographer, or a sculptor would do. “Failed films,” at least in his eyes, help him identify formal devices and solutions to be tackled with new work. Thus, repetitions and accumulations of filmic gestures mirror the craft and intellectualism that for him exists first and foremost on screen and one that he does not feel compelled to explain to his audience. Rather, his films are entirely self-contained – perhaps self-content— certainly self-referential and therefore, in his characterization, “abstract.”
Events Schedule
Private password protected vimeo Links – Kevin Jerome Everson short films
Georgia State University ' Teach In'
***Links active Feb. 25, 26, 2022***
Sound That is about employees of the Cleveland Water Department on the hunt for leaks in the infrastructure in Cuyahoga County. (Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2014, 11:40, 16mm, color, sound)
https://vimeo.com/149708962
Three Quarters features two magicians in Philadelphia practicing their slight of hand tricks. (Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2015, 4:37, 16mm, b&w, silent)
https://vimeo.com/679881849
Westinghouse One is about an old consumer product produced at the Westinghouse factory in Mansfield, Ohio in the 1960s. (Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 3:18, b&w, silent)
https://vimeo.com/679858850
Kadett C Three is about the speed and the specs of an Opel car. (Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2020, 2:35, b&w, German language)
https://vimeo.com/587643725
Round Seven is about Art McKnight waxing poetically about his famous 1978 Art McKnight vs. Sugar Ray Leonard prizefight. (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2018, 16mm transferred to digital, 18:51, colour, sound)
https://vimeo.com/679863608
How Can I Ever Be Late takes a Sly and the Family Stone tarmac arrival as a point of departure. One of a series of Black Fire films made in collaboration with UVA colleague Professor Claudrena N. Harold. (Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harold, US, 2017, 4:40, 16mm transferred to digital, b/w)
https://vimeo.com/499718671
May June July are represented with peonies, fireflies and the year 2020. (Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2021, 8:21, color, sound, no dialogue)
https://vimeo.com/515072591
Condor captures, in 16mm, the July 2, 2019 solar eclipse over the skies of coastal Chile in 100% totality. (Kevin Jerome Everson, US, 2019, 8:00, b&w, sound, no dialogue)
https://vimeo.com/586416910
Other work is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel and we invite you to familiarize yourselves with the work before the artist’s visit.
The teach-in is presented by the liquid blackness ensemble:
Ashley Hendricks, Alper Gobel, Corey Couch, Derrick Jones, Gail McFarland, Josh Cleveland, and Alessandra Raengo
About the Artist
Artist/Filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson was born and raised in Mansfield Ohio He has an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville Virginia. He has made over two-hundred feature length and short films including Tonsler Park (2017), The Island of Saint Matthews (2013), Erie (2010), Quality Control (2011), Ten Five in the Grass (2012), Ears, Nose and Throat (2016), Spicebush (2005), Stone (2013), Pictures From Dorothy (2004), Century (2013), Fe26 (2014), Sound That 20014), Sugarcoated Arsenic (2013) with Claudrena Harold, Emergency Needs (2007) and the eight-hour long film Park Lanes (2015). He also has three DVD box sets of his films How You Live Your Story: Selected Works by Kevin Jerome Everson distributed by Second Run, Broad Daylight and Other Times and I Really Hear Something: Quality Control and Other Films with a catalog distributed by Video Data Bank.
Everson’s films and artwork have been widely shown at venues including Sundance Film Festival, Berlin Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Oberhausen Film Festival, Venice International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Smithsonian Museum of African-American History in Washington D.C., The Tate Modern in London, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Centre Pompidou in Paris. The films were streamed on multiple platform sites including Criterion Channel and MUBI. The work has also been recognized through awards and fellowships such as Guggenheim Fellowship, an Alpert Award, a Heinz Award, a Creative Capital Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, an American Academy in Rome Prize and an American Academy in Berlin Prize.
Everson is represented by Picture Palace Pictures New York and Andrew Kreps Gallery New York.