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
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
Friday, March 25, 2022
2:00 PM 4:30 PM
Kopleff Recital Hall
liquid blackness in conversation with Kevin Jerome Everson
February 26 Teach-In
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.