Tonsler Park & Sugarcoated Arsenic
Kevin Jerome Everson 

HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark is hosting a film evening featuring two films, Tonsler Park (2017) and Sugarcoated Arsenic (2014) by Kevin Jerome Everson.

Tonsler Park (2017) is a film portrait of Kevin Jerome Everson showing the black employees at the Tonsler Park polling station in Charlottesville, Virginia. The film was shot on the day of the presidential election on November 8, 2016. On that day, the battle between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was decided. Like many of Kevin Jerome Everson’s films, also in Tonsler Park (2017) the artist turns the camera on black people, who are shown in their work routines. Various activities of the employees can be seen, such as taking an oath, forwarding the eligible voters, and distributing the ballots. The democratic process is recorded seemingly unnoticed by the camera, while the rooms of the location fill up and conversations arise in the hustle and bustle. The choice of location is not without significance either: Tonsler Park is named after Benjamin Tonsler, an African American school principal who continued to teach older African American students in Charlottesville in defiance of segregation laws.

For the film Sugarcoated Arsenic (2014), Everson collaborated with director Claudrena N. Harold, who, like Everson, is a professor at the University of Viriginia. Everson’s Companion Greg de Cuir Jr. says of the film: ​“The aim of the co-directors was to illuminate the legacy of Professor Vivian Gordon, who taught at the University in the 1970s and was known as a fierce and persistent critic of white supremacy. Harold had found some audio recordings of Gordon’s talks and lectures in the university archive, and then she became fascinated with the idea of bringing her story to life. Everson assumed, that there must also have been 16mm film material of Gordon in the archive, but no moving image documents were to be found. To compensate for this archival lack Everson decided to shoot 16mm film in a period fashion (…). The film is one of the most elaborate examples of Everson’s approach to the craft of filmmaking, in which he often fabricates props and other scenographic objects to insert into the body of his films as not just a documentary refusal, not only a way to merge his sculptural and plastic arts practice into the field of cinema, but also something of a seamless self-reflexive mark of the auteur.”