Kevin Jerome Everson, the abstract ideal

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Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (Novi Sad, Serbia)
24 May – 24 June 2019
Opening: 24 May 2019, Friday, 19h
Curator: Greg de Cuir Jr

After a celebrated solo presentation of his work for the cinema at Tate Modern in London in 2017, an expansive career overview at Harvard Film Archive in 2018, and a major retrospective of his films at Centre Pompidou in Paris in March this year as part of the festival Cinéma du réel, the influential US artist Kevin Jerome Everson arrives at the peak of his wildly successful career to the Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina in Novi Sad for a unique solo exhibition of his work. This gallery exhibition offers a selection of his short works on 16mm, installed as digital projections, as well as his eight-hour magnum opus Park Lanes (2015).

Kevin Jerome Everson is the most significant and the most prolific black film artist working today, with more than 150 films and videos to his credit. Everson’s style is immediately recognisable in its absence, or by its reduction of style. Call it an anti-aesthetic, prioritising minimalist gestures and the minutiae of everyday life. Most importantly, Everson regularly investigates the social and cultural conditions of Black Americans in the 21st century.

Everson was born (in 1965) and raised in the state of Ohio, and he also completed his art education there (MFA, Ohio University) with an emphasis in photography. After brief flirtations with painting and performance in the 1990s he soon settled into the twin poles of his practice: sculpture and the moving image. His central thematic concerns are the everyday, black cultures and experiences (primarily in the United States), and the unseen and underappreciated craft of labor. Park Lanes, an eight-hour video that records in semi-realtime one working day in a Virginia factory that produces bowling equipment, is the centerpiece of this exhibition. Many of Everson’s key and recurring concerns are on display in this video: manual labor as craft; work sites; time and duration; industrial objects; sculpture; process; et al. To this mid-point in his career it is Everson’s magnum opus, and as admirable a monument to the complex qualities of labor as has been created in contemporary moving image work.

Kevin Jerome Everson is an artist-filmmaker from Mansfield, Ohio, currently living and working in Charlottesville, Virginia. In his highly prolific career, Everson has made nine feature films and more than 150 short films, which have been exhibited internationally at film festivals including Sundance, Toronto, Venice, Rotterdam, Berlin, London, Ann Arbor, and Oberhausen. Everson has been the subject of mid-career retrospectives at Modern and Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, 2017; Viennale, Vienna, 2014; Visions du Reel, Nyon, 2012; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2011. His work has been featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials and the 2013 Sharjah Biennial. Everson is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina (MSUV) was founded as the Gallery of Contemporary Fine Art Novi Sad on 1 February 1966. The Museum implements the majority of its activities in a building that was designed in 1959 by architect Ivo Vitić for the requirements of the former Museum of the Socialist Revolution. The Museum maintains a museological-research approach to the preservation, exhibition, and presentation of works of contemporary art of the second half of the 20th and the 21st century, linking the local with the international art scene. Paintings, sculptures, objects and installations, prints and drawings, conceptual art, film, video, photography, intermedia and digital works, architecture, urban planning and design from Vojvodina, Serbia, as well as the works of foreign artists and art groups, can all be found in the Museum’s collection.

This exhibition is organised by Greg de Cuir Jr in collaboration with Mirjana Dušić, curator at Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, and Center for New Media kuda.org, and is supported by the United States Embassy in Belgrade. Special thanks to Trilobite-Arts DAC, Picture Palace Pictures, and Andrew Kreps Gallery.

Venue: 

Dates: 

Friday, May 24, 2019 (All day) to Monday, June 24, 2019 (All day)

Category: 

Dates: 

Friday, May 24, 2019 (All day) to Monday, June 24, 2019 (All day)
  • Dunavska 37
    21000   Novi Sad
    Serbia
    Phone: +381 21 526634
    45° 15' 23.4468" N, 19° 51' 11.6892" E