Production still from Polly One (2018, 6:12, color, silent), Copyright Kevin Jerome Everson; courtesy the artist; Trilobite-Arts DAC; Picture Palace Pictures
A SUBLIME OBFUSCATION: KEVIN JEROME EVERSON AT SEED SPACE
by Audrey Molloy
May 2, 2018
Response > Nashville, Tennessee
The sun is a buoyant and abstract form to be considered; it is a body whose recurrent narrative is a tragedy of light. These are the certain truths underscored in Kevin Jerome Everson’s Polly (2018), a significant film installation exhibiting for the first time at Nashville’s Seed Space. Featuring two single-channel films—one in color, the other an atemporal black and white—Polly One (2018) sequences durational excerpts of the sun on August 21, 2017 as the moon’s shadow occults its surface. A prolific artist best known for his quotidian films documenting contemporary social narratives, Everson’s Polly embodies the poetic equivalencies of prior filmic fables, but denotes an experiential consideration unburdened by social claims of past works.
Encountering Polly, visitors are presented with two simultaneous vantages, projected opposite from one another, of a nearly eclipsed sun. In both the star is buoyant and abstract, a singular formal phenomenon framed by a quickly departing sky. The narrative is relegated to eventuality of time; comprised of several long, single point-of-view frames, viewers adopt the stance of an unbiased participant before whom a celestial event is transpiring, knowingly observing the incremental diffusion of light and dissipating hues. In a certain climax, the film(s) end as the sun's final rays reach total extinction.
Installation view, Polly. Photo courtesy Seed Space. Photo credit Brian R. Jobe.
Installation view, Polly. Photo courtesy Seed Space. Photo credit Brian R. Jobe.
Polly is a sublime aesthetic experience. The Everson’s filmed documentation reconciles a celestial event incapable of being observed by the bare human eye save for at absolute totality—in total darkness. This is also the work's critical poeticism; the oppositional installation of both films negates the viewer’s ability to observe both films at the same time—at all potential angles of sight the viewer must physically obstruct their experience of the other. This individuated physical interaction with the films make it the viewer's labor to parse the significance of the event transpiring, but also mimics the interference necessary to observe these celestial phenomenon—a screening, so to say—psychologically displacing the viewer at the behest of the artists vision.
Perhaps a condition of Seed Space's intimate scale, this corporeal spatiality imbues Polly with a tension that one is, at all times, lacking omniscience. The viewers inability to make simultaneous observations functions as a kind of visual fragmentation and psychological obfuscation—an experiential eclipsing which, like Polly, is ascribed meaning through cyclical concealing and revealing.
Installation view, Polly. Photo courtesy Seed Space. Photo credit Brian R. Jobe.
Kevin Jerome Everson: Polly is on view at Seed Space from April 7 - May 26th, 2018.
Audrey Molloy is an arts writer and educator currently living in Nashville, Tennessee. She regularly contributes regionally-specific reviews and criticism to BURNAWAY, Nashville Arts Magazine, and is an Editorial Assistant at Aint-Bad. She most recently was in residence with Art Practical.
Seed Space is dedicated to narrowing the gap between local and national art communities by bringing attention to the excellence and diversity of contemporary art in Tennessee. We do so through bringing in renowned arts professionals to engage with the local art community and general public through public forums, studio visits, meals, individual meetings and academic engagement. We also offer exhibitions to emerging and mid-career artists. Our exhibition space functions as a lab for installation, sculpture and new media art.
seedspace.org
1201 4th Ave. South, Suite 117
Nashville, TN 37210
Friday - Saturday: 10am-2pm
info@locatearts.org
RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.