MOONSHINE: THE CELESTIAL FILMS OF KEVIN JEROME EVERSON June 15, 2023 – October 1, 2023
In partnership with Art Windsor-Essex (AWE), Media City Film Festival organized Kevin Jerome Everson’s first solo exhibition in Canada, curated by Greg de Cuir Jr. and Oona Mosna, with its inaugural installation at AWE’s flagship gallery in downtown Windsor. MOONSHINE: The Celestial Films of Kevin Jerome Everson marked the first occasion that the internationally celebrated American artist’s complete body of astral-focussed films were presented together, offering a rare chance to experience his cinematic renderings documenting the shape, surface, and spatio-temporal movements of stellar objects, tracing their revolutionary and cosmic cycles, and capturing brief and brilliant encounters between lunar and solar bodies. As stated by Dr. Terri Francis: ”Through Everson’s eyes, we share the perspective of a black artist following his curiosity and craft. Informed by conceptual art and realism, Everson’s work in moving images involves abstraction and reflexivity, and it is precisely, if ironically, the lack of cultural specificity or personal reference that centres blackness in a universal experience all of us can enjoy.” MOONSHINE’s Windsor edition featured six works: Rough and Unequal: Oceanus Procellarum (2017), Polly One (2018), Polly Two (2018), Condor (2019), Black Vulture (2021) and the world premiere of the artist’s most recent lunar study, Thirty-Seven Degrees (2023). MOONSHINE is slated to tour in 2024-2025.. KEVIN JEROME EVERSON (1965) is an artist and filmmaker born in Mansfield, Ohio. He has completed more than 200 films since 1997, quietly assembling one of the most remarkable collections of contemporary African American life ever committed to cinema. He received a BFA from University of Akron (1987) and an MFA from Ohio University (1990). His work has been exhibited widely at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Toronto International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and Venice International Film Festival. Everson has received midcareer film retrospectives at Cinéma du Réel / Centre Pompidou (2019), Harvard Film Archive (2018), Tate Modern (2017), and Media City Film Festival (2011). His work has also been featured at the 2008, 2012, and 2017 Whitney Biennials, the Sharjah Biennial (2013), and the Carnegie International (2018). He is a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award (2012), Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (2019), Berlin Prize (2020), and Guggenheim (1996) and American Academy in Rome Fellowships (2020). Media City Film Festival has screened 50+ films by Everson since 2009. He is Professor of Art at the University of Virginia. He lives in Charlottesville, Virginia. Artwork courtesy the artist, trilobite-arts DAC and Picture Palace Pictures. Special thanks to Madeleine Molyneaux (Picture Palace Pictures), Travis Bird (Shotgun Cinema), Sophie Cavoulacos (MoMA), Art Windsor-Essex staff, and David Cyrenne (Caesars Windsor).
