Half Way Home
GIDEST is delighted to present two events with Kevin Jerome Everson
DON'T NEED FOR NONE - Seven recent films - Thursday, October 1, 7pm. Kellen Auditorium, 66 Fifth Avenue.
HALF WAY HOME - A seminar and conversation - Friday, October 2, 12pm. GIDEST Lab, Room 411, 63 Fifth Avenue.
Born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, Kevin Jerome Everson has an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. He is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville.
Based on extensive historical research and embodying a profound sense of place, Everson's films combine scripted and documentary moments with rigorous formalism, his filmic subjects inspired directly by gestures, tasks, and conditions of working-class African American life. Avoiding traditional strategies of cinematic realism, Everson focuses on actions and statements, which are then abstracted into theatrical gestures, re-editing or restating archival footage, incorporating non-actors enacting fictional scenaria based on their own lives, intermeshing historical observations with contemporary narratives.
His artwork - paintings, sculptures, site-specific installations, and photographs - as well as his films, including five features (Spicebush, 2005; Cinnamon, 2006; The Golden Age of Fish, 2008; Erie, 2010; Quality Control, 2011), his celebrated eight-hour immersive documentary Park Lanes (2011), and over seventy short-form works, have been exhibited internationally at museums and art institutions, including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, MoMA, New York, the Whitney, New York, the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the Wurttenbergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart. His work was featured in the 2008 and 2012 Whitney Biennials and in the 2013 Sharjah Biennial, and at numerous international film festivals, including Venice, Sundance, Rotterdam, Toronto, SXSW, CPX:DOC, Copenhagen, and Curta Cinema, Rio. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, two NEH Fellowships, two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, an American Academy Rome Prize, residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell Colony and numerous university fellowships.