kevin jerome everson

 

  

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My films and artwork are about responding to daily materials, conditions, tasks and gestures of people of African descent. These materials, systems, tasks and gestures are repositioned through a variety of mediums such as photography, film, sculpture, artist books and paintings. The results usually have a formal reference to art history and resemble objects or images seen in working class culture. This strategy invites the work to be interpreted by a variety of communities. Over the past ten years I have completed two feature films and over twenty-five short 16mm, 35mm and digital films about the working class culture of Black Americans and other people of African descent.

Over the past twelve years I have completed three feature films and almost fifty short 16mm, 35mm and digital films about the working class culture of Black Americans and other people of African descent. My films focus on conditions, tasks, gestures, and materials in these communities. The films consist of the relentlessness of every day life, as well as its beauty-and have a naturalistic, almost documentary-like texture.

Recently I have been responding to the performance of peoples of African descent in old film footage as if it were theater. Either by reenacting the films or just using the footage, I am attempting to create an archive of these performances.

"A wildly prolific filmmaker who investigates the African-American past, class identity, and the practice of artmaking with a visual aesthetic so withholding that Charles Burnett seems florid by comparison, Everson has recently raided obscure archival sources to mine our cultural past for unexpected revelations. The Cleveland Trilogy uses re-enactments and late- 60's news footage to explore the tenure of Carl Stokes, the first black mayor of a major U.S. city; other shorts from this year remix Nixon-age moments from a Virginia TV station--local reports of a pageant queen, a drowned sailor, a female air-traffic controller--to suss out originally unintended profundities and hidden histories."

-Ed Halter, Village Voice