Everett Kane “Ground”

Black & White Gallery / Project Space

[Image: Untitled (Room) digital inkjet print (2014/2016)]

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Black & White Gallery/Project Space presents Everett Kane: Ground.

Intrigued by the questions of how past and present control and communication histories complicate one another, the Ground series explores the sinister possibilities of nostalgia through an eerie fusion of contemporary computer graphics and 19th century photography. The images juxtapose weaponized aesthetics of transmission with the most delicate domestic aesthetics of memory, forcing difficult tensions between the old, the new, the home, the battlefield, the spiritual, the manipulated, and the timeless to emerge.

Kane’s images hinge upon the introduction of antiquated communication devices into variously constructed intimate spaces. The effect creates a slippage in time, forcing the veneers of the present, the historical, the brutal, and the kind to recombine before the viewer. The confusion of attitudes and aesthetics is designed to evoke a spectrum of parallels with our current media moment.

Ground’s video component ups the stakes by introducing more forceful cognitive dissonances into play. The repetitive and hypnotic audio tracks are uncomfortably misaligned with the visuals at times to create effects which span the surreal and the treacherous. The result both heightens perceptions and numbs the viewer, following the mass media’s lead.

“The title Ground alludes to various poetries that travel through the work. Ground is danger. Ground is a pure form of electrical energy which attracts fire from the sky. Ground is safety, for wires and sane people are grounded. It is a pregnant emptiness, a charge filling our culture and technology with a buzz that hypnotizes, excites and numbs us. It is the sound of time. It is a blank on which we paint. But most of all it is the earth. It is the place where we lie, which is to say that it is neither heaven nor hell. Ground is what we have but cannot know. It is the sound of a consciousness that is incapable of grasping either itself or the whole. It is a beautiful, all-powerful noise, like a hum of power lines, but in the mind. It is where we go to rest, a territory, and perhaps even a subtle sheen on pictures.”
– Everett Kane

Everett Kane was born in San Francisco in 1971. He was educated at Princeton University and Art Center College of Design before entering careers in art, teaching, and freelance computer graphics. Kane’s work examines pain, emotion, violence, madness, torture, and politics. Central to his work is a desire to evoke empathy, pleasure and disgust through paradoxical and ambiguous presentations of bodies, histories, and memories. Ground is his first solo exhibition with Black & White Gallery. He has also shown at Location One, Chinatown Soup, White Box, Transfer, Envoy Enterprises, Kasia Kay Art Projects, Gallery Sensei, The Gallery of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, Animamus Art Salon, and the Los Angeles Arboretum. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Digital Arts at Pratt Institute.