About the Artist:

“In 1981 during my older brother’s high school graduation, my Uncle Wanky (William Everson) was taking a picture of my brother and his classmates.  He made a point to tell us that one of his pictures was going to be a work of ‘Art’, so he tilted the camera and took a picture. He explained by doing this he was creating a diagonal composition and thus it was closer to ‘Art’ then any of his previous pictures. As I stood next to him, little did I know that Uncle Wanky, a factory worker at the Ohio Brass at the time, knew what art was and is. I knew then that art was supposed to separate itself from other forms. One had to announce that one was about to make a work of art.”

Kevin Everson

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.

Research

“The foreground is in the way of the background. For me, the ground is the foreground, and the background is the figure”

Kevin Everson

To ask about the “subject matter” of Everson’s work is perhaps to ask the wrong question: true, his camera has captured the expertise, labor, patience, and inventiveness of black folk in a variety of settings and circumstances that are often tied to regional cultures and particularly focused on his native Mansfield, OH. Yet, he also has a growing body of work that turns the camera to the sky, toward solar eclipses, or the surface of the moon. In other works, he points his camera to flowers or fireflies, or the locking damns in the Panama canal. In each case, the first impulse and ultimate goal is an exploration of form.

When the filmmaker says “the foreground is in the way of the background. For me, the ground is the foreground, and the background is the figure”[1] is calls attention to his effort to make the figure, i.e., the subject matter in the foreground, be perceived as if it was the background, while the image’s background is what Everson approaches as figure. That is, all of his films are formal investigations into how to use “representation” or “reality” (which he approaches as a device) in order to achieve abstractions. Abstraction, in turn, is the process through which his films shift attention to formal experimentations.

Following up on research for an interview Alessandra Raengo and Lauren McCleod Cramer conducted with the artist for liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 5.2 (Fall 2021) and in preparation for Everson’s visit at GSU as inaugural Ferrer Visiting Artist in the College of the Arts (March 23-25, 2022) we have collected selected writings on the artist, interviews, exhibitions as well as a few “theoretical frames” to help us think about his extraordinary output. Knowing full well that an overarching framing, or definitive genres characterizations are impossible, we highlight the interplay between form, formlessness, and informality; his approach to filmmaking as an “art practice,” which unfolds by producing several bodies of work; his experimentations with visual, sonic and gestural rhythms; his explorations of modes of play, everyday craft and artistry; his careful use of props (including props he sculpts and which, deliberately, do not work in order to maximize their formal resonance within the frame); and finally his attention to what we call the “poiesis of black life.”

[1] Kevin Jerome Everson and Terri Francis, “Process: Interview with Kevin Jerome Everson, September 29, 2019,” in Grunwald Gallery of Art and Black Film Center/Archive, ed. Rough and Unequal: A Film By Kevin Jerome Everson (Bloomington: Grunwald Gallery of Art, 2021 

Theoretical Contexts

Form, Formlessness, Informality

Bellour, Raymond. “Concerning the Photographic.” In Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, 253-276. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Best, Stephen M. None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Bois, Yve-Alain and Rosalind E. Krauss. Formless: A User’s Guide. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1997.

Buchloh, Benjamin H. D. Formalism and Historicity: Models and Methods in Twentieth-Century Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2015.

Burdeau, Emmanuel. “Notes on Kevin Jerome Everson’s Films.” In Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson, 16-23. Chicago: Video Data Bank, 2011.

Christopher Law, “‘Common Informality’: Aesthetics, Renomination, Philology.” liquid blackness: journal of aesthetics and black studies 6 no. 1 (April 2022) 

DeCristo, Jeramy. “Ma Rainey’s Phonograph.” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 28, no. 3 (2018): 204-220.

Focillon, Henri. The Life of Forms in Art. Translated by George Kubler. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1989.

Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood.” Artforum 5 (1967): 12-23.

Gillespie, Michael B. “‘To Do Better:’ Notes on the Works of Kevin Jerome Everson.”  In Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson, 58-70. Chicago: Video Data Bank, 2011.

Greenberg, Clement. “Necessity of Formalism.” New Literary History 3, vol. 1 (Autumn 1971): 171-175.

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.

Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Moten, Fred. Stolen Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Moten, Fred. The Universal Machine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.

Moten, Fred. Black and Blur. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017

Mundt, Katrin. “Who Killed Evidence?” In Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson, 40-55. Chicago: Video Data Bank, 2011.

Raengo, Alessandra and Lauren McLeod Cramer. “‘There Is No Form in the Middle’: Kevin Jerome Everson's Massive Abstractions.” liquid blackness 5 (2): 121–151. (2021) https://doi.org/10.1215/26923874-9272822

Remes, Justin. Motion[less] Cinema: The Cinema of Stasis. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Williams, James Gordon. Crossing Bar Lines: The Politics and Practices of Black Musical Space. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2021.

Intermediality and Artist Cinema

Balsom, Erika. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.

Butler, Alison. “A Deictic Turn: Space and Location in Contemporary Gallery Film and Video Installation,” Screen 54, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 305-323.

Connolly, Maeve. The Place of Artists’ Cinema: Space, Site, and Screen. Wilmington, NC: Intellect Ltd, 2009.

Fowler, Catherine. “Obscurity and Stillness: Potentiality in the Moving Image." Art Journal 72, no. 1 (2013): 64-79.

Fowler, Catherine. “Remembering Cinema ‘Elsewhere’: From Retrospection to Introspection in the Gallery Film.” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 26-45.

Jennings, Gabrielle, ed. Abstract Video: The Moving Image in Contemporary Art. Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2015.

Uroskie, Andrew V. Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Abstraction and Monochromatism

Blazwick, Iwona, Sophie McKinlay, Magnus af Petersens, and Candy Stobbs, eds. Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015. London: Prestel and Whitechapel Gallery, 2015

Crawford, Margo Natalie. Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2017.

Darby English, 1971: A Year in the Life of Color. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Elcott, Noam M. Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Edwards, Adrienne. Blackness in Abstraction. New York: Pace Gallery, 2016.

Getsy, David J. Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016.

Greenberg, Clement. “After Abstract Expressionism.” The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance. Ed. John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994: 121-134.

Harper, Phillip Brian. Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Millner-Larsen, Nadja. “The Subject of Black: Abstraction and the Politics of Race in the Expanded Cinema Environment.” Grey Room (2017).

Sorensen, Roy. Seeing Dark Things: The Philosophy of Shadows. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Staff, Craig. Monochrome: Darkness and Light in Contemporary Art. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015.

Rhythmanalysis

Henriques, Julian, Milla Tiainen, and Pasi Väliaho. “Rhythm Returns: Movement and Cultural Theory.” Body & Society 20, no. 3-4 (2014): 3-29.

Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum, 2004.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Torlasco, Domietta. The Rhythm of Images: Cinema Beyond Measure. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2021.

Vallee, Mickey. “The Rhythm of Echoes and Echoes of Violence.” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 1 (2017): 97-114.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005

Play, Gesturality, Objecthood

Agamben, Giorgio “Notes on Gesture.” In Means Without Ends: Notes on Politics, 49-70. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

Agamben, Giorgio. “In Playland: Reflections on History and Play.” In Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, 75-96. Translated by Liz Heron. London and New York: Verso, 1993.

Barber, Stephen. Performance Projections: Film and the Body in Action. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014.

Boman, Stephan. “In the Flesh: Balázs, Brakhage, and the Anatomy of Filmic Gesture.” Discourse 42, no. 3 (2020): 305-331.

Brannigan, Erin. Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 

Flusser, Vilém. Gestures. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Room for Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema,” October 109 (Summer 2004): 3-45.

Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London, Boston, and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1949.

Johnson, Galen A. “Introduction: Alterity as a Reversibility’. In Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty. Eds. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Xvii-xxxiv.

Jeanne, Allen. “Self-Reflexivity and the Documentary Film.” Cinetracs 2 (Summer 1977): 37-43.

Laxton, Susan. Surrealism at Play. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Manning, Erin. Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy. Reprint edition. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012.

Martin, Adrian. Last Day Every Day: Figural Thinking From Auerbach and Kracauer To Agamben and Brenez. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012.

Noland, Carrie. Agency and Embodiment: Performing Gestures/Producing Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

Sicart, Miguel. Play Matters. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014.

Stam, Robert. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.

Poiesis of Black Life

Carter, J. Kameron. “Black malpractice (a poetics of the sacred).” Social Text 37, no. 2 (2019): 67-107.

Carter, J. Kameron, and Sarah Jane Cervenak. “Black Ether.” CR: The New Centennial Review 16, no. 2 (2016): 203-224. 

Cervenak, Sarah Jane. Black Gathering: Art, Ecology, Ungiven Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.

Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016.

Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “In the Raw.” e-flux 93 (September 2018).

Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal Beyond the Limits of Critique.” PhiloSOPHIA 8, no. 1 (2018): 19-41.

Judy, Ronald A. Sentient Flesh: Thinking in disorder, poiésis in black. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Quashie, Kevin. Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 

Reed, Anthony. Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020.

Stadler, Gustavus. “Sound and (Black) Objecthood.” Sound Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 170-172.

Object-Orientation and the Matter of Blackness

Aranke, Sampada. “Material Matters: Black Radical Aesthetics and the Limits of Visibility,” e-flux journal #79 February 2017.

Ferreira da Silva, Denise. “On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value.” Journal e-flux 79 (2017).

Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: NYU Press, 2020

McKittrick, Katherine. “Mathematics Black Life.” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 16-28.

Raengo, Alessandra. “Black Matters,” Discourse 38, no. 2 (2016): 246-264.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana “On the Limits and Promise of New Materialist Philosophy.” Lateral 5.1 (Spring 2016).

Vaziri, Parisa. “Blackness and the Metaethics of the Object.” Rhizomes 29, no. 1 (2016).