Press Release Visual Exhibition

For further information please contact:

Laurie Lazer:            415 255 5971, laurie@luggagestoregallery.org

Dates:                        January 14, 2011 – February 19, 2011

Reception:              January 14, 2011

Hours:                        7-9pm

Venue:            the luggage store

Address            1007 Market Street

                        San Francisco, CA 94103

Tel.                        415 255 5971

Hours:                        Wed-Saturday, 12-5 and by appointment

Website            www.luggagestoregallery.org (currently being redesigned)

The luggage store is honored to present:

Title: Cusp and Circumstance

Works on film and video by

Kevin Jerome Everson and Akosua Adoma Owusu

Guest curated by Arnold J. Kemp

At the heart of this two-person exhibition is the relationship between

two Black artists who will be showing their work side-by-side for the first

time. In fact Akosua Adoma Owusu (b. 1984) is a protege of

prolific filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson (b. 1965).

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Through means that are purely visual,, this exhibition seeks to explore the relationships between the work of Everson and Owusu who initially came into contact with each other as teacher and student. The exhibition will reveal the correspondences between Owusu's and Everson's works, which exist on the cusp between reality and fiction and the displacement between America and Africa.

This exhibition also seeks to bring works that are usually shown in film festivals and small screening rooms into the setting of an experimental art gallery.

For more than twelve years, Kevin Jerome Everson (Charlottesville,

Virginia) has been making films about the working-class culture of

Black Americans and people of African descent. He has completed a prodigious

number of works, including three features and over forty short 16mm, 35mm,

and digital films.

Born and raised in Mansfield, Ohio, Eversonfrequently records family, friends, and life in the Midwest, but he has alsodeveloped art projects in Rome and elsewhere. His films look for theart in everyday life, revealing people's relationship to their crafts andfocusing on the conditions, tasks, gestures, and materials in communities.

Much of Everson's recent work is inspired by found footage. He

manipulates news and sports footage, old films, still photographs, and image files

in various ways, subtly repositioning or restaging actions and movements

to highlight or shift the original emphasis.

Everson's presentation at the Luggage Store will include several premieres of shorts as well as:

Emergency Needs (2007), based on a press conference with Cleveland

mayor Carl Stokes

The Reverend E. Randall T. Osborn, First Cousin (2007) about the art of

the cut-away.

According to¦ (2007) with a rich source of found footage and shot

film, is a short film about several versions of tragic events in southern

rural Black America.

Ninety-Three (2008)  a re-enactment of a family birthday.

Akosua Adoma Owusu  a Virginia born Ghanaian filmmaker and artist,

earned a Distinguished BA degree in Media Studies and Fine Art at the

University of Virginia. A protegé of prolific filmmaker Kevin Everson, Owusu

went on to enroll at California Institute of the Arts in the MFA program of

Film & Video and Fine Art. Inspired by her bi-national identity and

West African griot folklore, she creates personal film essays to insert

herself in the tradition of African storytelling.

Her thesis film, Me Broni Ba (my white baby) gained the attention at high profile festivals worldwide, including Rotterdam, BFI London, Cannes, MoMA, Visions du Reel, SanFrancisco, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, DOK Leipzig, among numerousothers. It won Best Documentary prizes at Chicago Underground and Athens Film &Video Festival and Special Mention at Real Life Documentary Festival.

Owusu worked as a Development and Production intern at Echo Lake Productions and at HBO Films.

Owusu was awarded an Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences grant to provide post-production assistance on Chris Rock's critically acclaimed

documentary, Good Hair. Her videos have shown at a variety of art

venues including the Studio Museum at Harlem, BOZAR in Brussels, LA Freewaves, New Langton Arts, Spaces Gallery, and CCH's PounderKone Artspace. She is an alumnus of the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2008. Owusu was a featured artist at the 56th Robert Flaherty Film Seminar.

Owusu's presentation at the Luggage Store will include:

1.)    A world the world premiere of White Afro (2011) ; a film

comprised of found footage reframed to question exactly how in the 1970's the

Afro was marketed to white hairdressers

2.)    Mi Broni Ba (2008), a lyrical portrait of hair salons in Kumasi,

Ghana. The tangled legacy of European colonialism in Africa is evoked

through images of women practicing hair braiding on discarded white

baby dolls from the West. The film unfolds through a series of vignettes,

Set against a child's story of migrating from Ghana to the United States.

The film uncovers the meaning behind the Akan term of endearment, me broni

ba, which means "my white baby

3.)    Revealing Roots (2010) a silent re-enactment of one of the most

dramatic scenes from the television version of Alex Haley's

Roots, combining found footage and scenes that star Owusu herself along with

other African actors.

4.)    Drexciya  (2010) referencing an underwater country populated by

the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off of slave ships

that had adapted to breathe underwater in their mother's wombs.

Both Everson and Owusu make objects as well as films and they will

present a group of sculptural works as well that emphasize for the viewer the

way the materially inflected history of racial politics remains always

Immanent, even if, at times, occluded in symbolism and metaphor.

The exhibition's curator is Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968), an artist

and writer and former associate curator (1993 - 2003) at San

Francisco's& nbsp;Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He is the recipient of grants and

awards from Printed Matter Inc., Art Matters, the Joan Mitchell Foundation,

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Artadia Fund for Art, and the Portland

Institute of Contemporary Art. His works are in the collections of the

Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the

Berkeley Art Museum and the Seattle Art Museum. He is the Chair of the Master of Fine Arts in Visual Studies Program at Pacific Northwest College of Art.

300 Dpi JPEGS Attached: