How you live your story : selected works

"With 131 short films and nine features, the artist Kevin Jerome Everson may well be the most prolific American filmmaker working today. He is also the most aesthetically radical, not least because of his interrogation of the intertwined formations of blackness, labour and place. Everson pursues an abstraction that is forged through a work on the photorealist image, a formalism uniquely leavened with an attentive approach to the histories and presences of the African-American working-class individuals he films ... Everson recovers untold histories and minor figures of African-American life in the South and Midwest, in the wake of the Second Great Migration, which took millions of African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest and West between 1940 and 1970. Trained as a visual artist, seasoned in sculpture, street photography, painting and installation, he adopted filmmaking as his primary practice in 1997, using found footage, portraiture, re-enactment, documentary, archival historiography and performance art ... Everson's films investigate the expressive capacities, conditions and materialities of unseen craft or marginalised gestures. Various tasks, processes and actions are performed ritually for the camera. Corporeal movement operates at once as training, grind, and zone of contingency: a hospital worker sorts surgical implements, dancers energetically krump (Erie, 2010), an elderly beauty-school instructor demonstrates hair-conditioning techniques, a water-skier glides, a dam worker surveys (The Island of St. Matthews, 2013), football players practise scrimmage moves (Tygers, 2014), cowboys and cowgirls practise the art of calf-roping and lassoing for the rodeo (Ten Five in the Grass, 2012). Sport and toil, leisure and ceremony, all elaborate a poetics of performance"--Second Run website | Education, landscapes, gaining and losing a job, and the passage of time. The title of the film refers to the state butterfly of Mississippi, the Spicebush Swallowtail. | The citizens of Westport, a community just west of Columbus, Mississippi, reminisce about the 1973 flood of the Tombigbee River. | Election Day, November 8, 2016 in Charlottesville, Virginia. | Two gentlemen making a living hustling metal in Cleveland, Ohio. | Employees of the Cleveland Water Department on the hunt for leaks in the infrastructure in Cuyahoga County. | During a medical examination, Shadeena Brooks recounts a horrible event she eyewitnessed. | A series of single take 16mm shots in and around communities near Lake Erie. Black migration in the USA, contemporary conditions, folks concentrating on the task at hand, theater and famous art objects. | On a summer afternoon, two men and a boat will eventually and pleasantly get to a destination. | A film about one of the first predominantly Black neighborhoods in Mansfield, Ohio that began during the post-war migration of Blacks from the south to the north in the late 1940s. | A film about the result of labor. Shot in and around Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo. The title is the three-letter airport code for Brazzaville. | Black cowgirls and cowboys prepare themselves for the rodeo event of calf roping. Filmed in Lafayette, Louisiana and Natchez, Mississippi, the title refers to the type of rope used to capture fast calves. | The end to a lovely evening in Detroit. | Two magicians in Philadelphia practice their sleight of hand tricks. | Commissioned by the Scribe Video Center to honour the 100 year anniversary of the great Black migration in Philadelphia, and loosely based on the life of UNIA member James Walker Hood Eason (1886-1923). | Three famous UFO sightings over Mansfield, Ohio. | Another take on the Lumière brothers' classic 1895 film, Workers leaving the factory. | Ninety-nine percent totality. The skies above Saluda, North Carolina during the 2017 eclipse across North America. | Centering around the famous March 1, 1978 boxing match in Dayton, Ohio between Sugar Ray Leonard and local prizefighter Art McKnight. | The Virginia Union University football team working together. | Airmen training and working at Columbus Air Force Base in the 14th Flying Training Wing in Columbus, Mississippi. | Birdwatchers looking for the state bird of Georgia.