CUSP
January 14, - February 19, 2011
Reception: Friday,  January 14,
7-9pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 12noon-5pm, and
by
appointment
www.luggagestoregallery.org
Through means that are
purely visual CUSP,
a two-person exhibition and
multi-screen installation,
explores the relationships between the works of Everson and Owusu who
initially came into contact with each other as teacher and student. CUSP
reveals the correspondences between projected moving images which exist on
the cusp between reality and fiction and the displacement between
America and Africa.
Kevin Jerome Everson
(born 1965 in Mansfield, Ohio)
is currently an Associate Professor at the University of Virginia in
Charlottesville. He has made to date four feature-length films and over 70
shorts. His debut feature, Spicebush (2005), a mediation on rhythms of work and
the passage of time in Black American working class communities, world premiered
at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and won the Jury
Documentary Prize at the New York Underground Film Festival. Cinnamon (2006),
premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and IFFR and has played at several
international film festivals, including FID Marseille. The IFFR commissioned
Emergency Needs (2007) was selected for inclusion in the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
The Golden Age Of Fish (2008) has shown at IFFR, BAFICI (Argentina) and NYUFF.
Everson's most recent feature Erie premiered at the International Film
Festival, Rotterdam in February 2010, as did BZV, an IFFR commissioned project
shot in Brazzaville Congo.
Grounded in historical
research and a strong sense of place, Kevin Jerome Everson's films and videos
combine documentary and scripted elements with a sparse, rugged formalism. His
ongoing subject matter is the lives of African Americans and other people of
African descent, often working class, but he eschews standard realism in favor
of strategies that abstract everyday actions and statements into theatrical
gestures: archival footage is re-edited or re-staged, real people perform
fictional scenarios based on their own lives, historical observations intermesh
with contemporary narratives. His films suggest the relentlessness of everyday
life-along with its beauty-but also present oblique metaphors for
art-making.
Akosua Adoma Owusu (b.
1984), a Virginia born,
Ghanaian-American 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.
Owusu's film, Me Broni Ba
(my white baby) has gained much attention at high profile festivals
worldwide, including Rotterdam, BFI London, Cannes, MoMA, Visions du Reel,
SanFrancisco, Festival du Nouveau Cinema, DOK Leipzig, among numerous others.
It won Best Documentary prizes at Chicago Underground and Athens Film & Video
Festival and Special Mention at Real Life Documentary Festival.
Owusu was featured in a solo show (VideoStudio: Changing Same,
curated by Thomas Lax) at the
Studio Museum in Harlem, NY in 2010. Owusu also showed work in Quadruple
Consciousness, curated by Malik Gaines at Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA and in
2009 in 30 Seconds Off an Inch, curated by Naomi Beckwith, Studio Museum at
Harlem, Harlem,
NY.
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