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Lago Gatún
Kevin Jerome Everson 

Film screening 

Kevin Jerome Everson, Lago Gatun, 2021
16mm, black and white, sound, 60 min.

Courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures, New York

At the end of the exhibition Recover, HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark will show the film work Lago Gatún (2021) by Kevin Jerome Everson on the big screen in the main room.

The film Lago Gatún (2021) was shot by Kevin Jerome Everson during the pandemic as part of his residency at the American Academy in Berlin. There he worked on several projects that relate to an early experience of the artist. The starting point was his enthusiasm for the Opel Kadett C 3, which his father, a car mechanic, had brought home from work when he was a child. Everson later found out that the German automaker’s model had come to his hometown of Mansfield, an industrial town, via the Panama Canal. For Lago Gatún, Everson spent four days at the Panama Canal, tracing maritime trade routes. The film shows a journey from south to north through the canal, condensing the multiple connections between shipping traffic and automotive industries. Thus, the film shows masterfully formalized shots of the canal, the ships, of the water and lock systems. The work is concentrated to the extreme, revealing a temporality of its own and, as is so often the case with Everson, allowing cinematic abstraction to come to the fore.

Artists

Participating artists

Kevin Jerome Everson

*1965 Mansfield, lives in Charlottsville

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.

Kevin Jerome Everson, Lago Gatun, 2021
16mm, black and white, sound, 60 min.

Courtesy the artist; trilobite-arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures, New York