Artist Statement

Kevin Jerome Everson

doi:10.1353/cal.2014.0142

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Artist Statement
Kevin Jerome Everson (bio)

My dad was an auto mechanic, he probably had a ninth grade, tenth grade education; my mother was a bank teller. So that kind of working-class background dictates the way I look at things. A lot of people think I work in this kind of factory mentality, making pieces of parts. I don’t see my art as embracing that way of “assembly.” I see it as a problem-solving way of assembly. But yes, I’m rooted in a Midwestern thing, people always working. I feel guilty when I come to school if I don’t put in a solid eight, I can’t go home. In the Midwest, as a factory worker, you had to make something out of nothing. You go in a place and eight hours later, you got some shit to look at. It’s not like these financial cats, you go into a place and you look at spreadsheets, there’s nothing tangible. But to go in, see a product, and feel a thing. I think it’s a different kind of mentality. Because the results are right in front of you. Either the results are right in front of you or it’s on your pants. Because you have dirt, grease, and grime on your ass. I remember people would say, “I go home not to wash the dirt off me, but to wash the work off me.” They’d say, “I still got my job on me.” That’s why I like art because you can see what you’ve done or hear what you’ve done.

The main thing I like doing is filming people of African descent, black folks, who are really good at what they do, showing talents and stuff like that. The people on screen are always smarter than the viewer, so the viewer has to catch up. That’s what I do. I like to position the subject in which they are smarter than the viewer because they are engaged in something that is an internal language. … So I’m not creating a conflict through editing, I’m creating a situation so the viewer has to engage in it. … I am presenting a condition of a situation, not a story. … I’m just trying to make art. I’m just trying to make handsome images of working-class Midwestern black folk. [End Page 799]