The sixth instalment of Hôtel le Lièvre is dedicated to the work of Cheyney Thompson and Kevin Jerome Everson. Their respective mediums, painting and film, appear in this installation as open fields that relate to one another by their shared rituals and constructed specificity. If Everson thinks of his films through painting, where frame, paint, gesture or support homologates with lens, film, screen and montage, Thompson’s paintings resonate with cinematic operations such as cutting, repeating, recording and editing, and film’s inscription into broader systems of image production. Labouring bodies, automation and circularity emerge as common themes, engaging the viewer in a cross reading of the codes that shape and inform their artistic mediums.
Through archival, documentary and scripted footage, Everson diffuses the limits between fiction and documentary, portraying detailed aspects of individual personality in everyday gestures of work and leisure. His films draw from the avant-garde wide array of experimental techniques to address race, class, and labour. In Barrell, a camera rotating 360 degrees shows the entirety of a Mississippi liquor store and its owner taking inventory. The circular motion recalls earlier experimentations on the camera’s spatial possibilities from a single axis, such as Michael Snow’s 1972 “La region centrale”. This imposed circularity is not a mere formal resource but a way of reading an equally methodical, monotonal activity. As every passage reveals a slightly different perspective of the store and the owner’s movements, an increasingly detailed observation surfaces from a collection of possible angles through repetition.
To deconstruct how a painting is created, Thompson often imposes a set of constraints to his own work, whose combinatorial logic carries the possibility of multiple and unknown results. His works tend to reveal the different processes that articulate these rules with materials on canvas, his Displacement series being a record of the tools’ interaction with the surface. A stencil made of fivemillimetre square marks is painted in black on a white support, already activating movement in a discordant figure-ground relationship. A custom snake-like silicone tool is used to force the squares out of place, extending, distorting and dragging the line into shapes that may appear as coded painterly gestures. In Displacement [32028, 8, 12] Thompson has sprayed four sweeping arcs of bright red, yellow, green, and blue onto the white support. The curved structure of the arch, which reverberates in Everson’s motion of the camera, is used to explore and span a larger area, becoming markers of the wider territory in which these works operate.
Cheyney Thompson (1975) lives and works in New York. His work was recently included in Low Form. Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at MAXXI, Rome (2019) and in Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 at the Whitney Museum, New York (2019). His work was on view at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016) and Whitney Museum, New York (2015) in Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner. Thompson had a survey exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts (2012) with an accompanying monograph and a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2012). His work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial as well as the 2003 Venice Biennale, curated by Francesco Bonami.
Since the late 1990s, Kevin Jerome Everson has created a singular body of work that conflates archival, documentary and scripted footage, blurring the distinctions between what is real, and what is simulated. Everson’s work is currently included in New Labor Movements at the McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco, on view through April 24th, 2021. In 2020, Everson was the recipient of the Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin. His films have been exhibited and screened widely, including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2019, The Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles, CA, 2019, Polly: Recent Films and Collaborations by Kevin Jerome Everson, BAMcinemafest, Brooklyn, NY, 2018, Quality Control: An Affinity for Technique, National Museum of African American History and Cultural, Washington D.C., 2018, So I Can Get Them Told: Retrospective, Tate Modern, London, 2017, Kevin Jerome Everson, Berkeley Museum of Art Pacific Film Archives, Berkeley, 2017, among others.
