Tonsler Park & Sugarcoated Arsenic
Kevin Jerome Everson
Film screening
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.”
Artists
Participating artists
Kevin Jerome Everson
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.