“There Is No Form in the Middle”

Abstract

AbstractAcross his vast body of multimedia art, Kevin Jerome Everson pursues sophisticated formal exercises that deploy representational devices with the aim of achieving “massive abstractions.” Focusing on the sculptural potential of film as a time-based medium, Everson crafts his films as sculptural objects. It is a process that works toward a point of critical density in which time's material effects on a space, a body, or the screen are rendered visible. In order to reach this point, Everson has developed a rigorous practice that includes casting his own solid rubber props, carefully choreographing films that repeat formal and bodily gestures, and making oblique references to cinematic history and its foundational relationship to factory labor. In this interview the liquid blackness editors speak with Everson about his “massive” creative project; its pursuit of layered self- referentiality; the work's sheer size (measured in labor hours, custom props molded, and film titles); his fine art training; artistry as the mastery of craft; the high art of Richard Pryor; his hesitant, delicate approach to blackness; and the possibility of a midwestern, or specifically Mansfield, Ohio, artistic sensibility.