Erie
Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | November 6, 2010
Thursday, November 11, 6 p.m. | Kevin Jerome Everson in person!
Still from “Erie” (Kevin Jerome Everson, 2010).
Over the past thirteen years, Kevin Jerome Everson has crafted an exquisite—and prodigious—body of work on the working-class culture of African-Americans and people of African descent. Combining documentary and fiction, Everson’s nearly 70 shorts and four features center on everyday tasks and gestures to unearth and illuminate the ordinary grace of daily life. This evening, in conjunction with the Video Data Bank’s release of the 25-title DVD box set, Broad Daylight and Other Times: Selected Works of Kevin Jerome Everson, the artist presents his acclaimed feature Erie (2010) along with a handful of new shorts. Unspooling in a series of hand-held, single-take shots filmed in the urban centers around the great lake, Erie captures the conversation of former General Motors workers as the plant is about to close; hospital employees carefully sorting and sterilizing surgical implements; and young performers krumping and rehearsing musical theater side-by-side, the camera moving between them in a kind of mash-up-en-scene and microcosm of the rich and multifaceted operation of the film as a whole. Co-presented by the Video Data Bank. Kevin Jerome Everson, 2010, USA, HDCAM video, ca. 90 min (plus discussion).
KEVIN JEROME EVERSON (1965, Mansfield, OH) has made four feature-length films and nearly seventy shorts. He received an MFA from Ohio University and a BFA from the University of Akron. His films and artwork have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Armand Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, Florida; Wurttenbergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart, Germany; the Spaces Gallery, Cleveland; the American Academy of Rome, Italy; the Sundance Film Festival; Rotterdam International Film Festival; Cinematexas; Ann Arbor Film Festival; and Chicago Underground Film Festival, among many others. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, two fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, two Ohio Arts Council Fellowships, an American Academy Rome Prize, and residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell Colony. He is currently Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Virginia and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Further reading:
- Ed Halter, “The Practice of Everyday Life,” Artforum (May 2010): 228-33.
- Laila Lalami, “The Pay-Off: Kevin Everson Turns the Ordinary into the Extraordinary,” Independent Film and Video Monthly (Jan-Feb 2005); 28 (1): 22-26.
- Kevin Everson at the Whitney Biennial 2008
About
Conversations at the Edge is a weekly series of screenings, performances, and talks by groundbreaking media artists.
CATE is organized by SAIC's Department of Film, Video, New Media, and Animation in collaboration with the Gene Siskel Film Center and SAIC's Video Data Bank.
Programs take place at the Gene Siskel Film Center (164 N. State / Chicago, IL / 312.846.2600), unless otherwise noted.
