Artist Talk - Kevin Jerome Everson — HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark

Lecture

Kevin Jerome Everson
Photo (detail): Sandy Williams

Kevin Jerome Everson’s body of cinematic work dates back to the late 1990s and includes over 160 short films and nine feature-length films. Working exclusively in 16mm format, the artist’s films range in length from a few minutes to 8 hours (Park Lanes, 2015) and have meanwhile been fully digitized.

Everson grew up in Mansfield, Ohio; a town deeply rooted in the working world of industrial culture. As a result, many of Everson’s films depict African-American people in their work culture and performing their jobs. Yet his artistic practice cannot be reduced to the documentary; rather, Everson has a unique relationship to abstraction, cinematographic imagery, editing, as well as the materiality of film. In some of his films, the distinction between reality and fiction blurs as the artist questions or dissolves the boundaries of archival footage and scripted scenes. By looking closely and knowing Everson’s approach to sculpture, trained viewers can see how the artist subverts expected reality and makes his authorship visible.

The artist lecture by Kevin Jerome Everson offers visitors of the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark the first opportunity so far within Austria to gain insights into the work of the renowned experimental filmmaker from the artist himself.

A recording of this Artist lecture will subsequently be available as an audio file on the Study Room website.

Artists

Participating artists

The work and practice of Kevin Jerome Everson encompasses photography, printmaking, sculpture and film. He studied at the University of Akron as well as at Ohio University and is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Everson has been recognized with the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Alpert Award in Film/Video, the Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities, the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome and the Fellowship of the American Academy in Berlin. He was awarded various grants, from Creative Capital, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; and the Ohio Arts Council.

His artwork has been the subject of retrospectives and solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul; and the Harvard Film Archive. His works were presented at international film festivals and art institutions including the Unknown Pleasures Festival, Berlin; Sundance Film Festival, Utah; International Film Festival Rotterdam; Images Film Festival Toronto; Venice International Film Festival; BFI/London Film Festival, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; the Viennale, Vienna; BlackStar Film Festival, Philadelphia; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; MOCA, Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MoMA, New York; and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture, Washington D.C. His films have been featured at the 2008, 2012 and 2017 Whitney Biennial and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial.

Everson is represented by Picture Palace Pictures, New York and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York.