Kevin Jerome Everson “Mansfield Deluxe”
Andrew Kreps Gallery
[Image: Kevin Jerome Everson "Rekord C Three" (2021)]
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Andrew Kreps Gallery presents Mansfield Deluxe, an exhibition by Kevin Jerome Everson at 22 Cortlandt Alley.
Mansfield Deluxe takes its title from a new sculpture of the same name - a group of three rubber tires cast from a mold of a Fiat car tire produced by Mansfield Tire, a now-defunct company that was based in Everson’s hometown in Ohio. Through this process of translation, Everson places a renewed focus on this vernacular object whose production was part of the automotive industry that once fueled the economy of Mansfield, and has now all but disappeared. Positioned as a relic or artifact, Mansfield Deluxe continues a thread within Everson’s practice that seeks to shift the narrative around labor, reversing the hierarchy that positions industry over individuals. This strategy is also seen in Signal 30, a sculpture composed of five cast traffic cones, the identical model to those used in a 1959 driver’s education video of the same title filmed in Mansfield. Now banned for educational purposes, the film featured real footage of victims of car accidents dying, or dead filmed by police officers. Initially intended to promote the use of seat belts, the film and its memory now serve as a harsh reminder of violence and loss.
Projected on a freestanding wall in the center of the gallery is Everson’s new dual-channel projection Opel, which reflects on Everson’s own high school experience with Army Recruiters, who to this day maintain a disproportionate presence in working-class communities, particularly communities of color. At the time, recruiters would often tell Black American teenagers that it was cheaper to purchase a car in Panama, or West Germany, and ship it than it would be to purchase one in the U.S. Comprised of two films, individually titled Kadett C Three and Rekord C Three, they each depict toy cars, filmed in black in white, moving from meditative takes to scenes of fast-paced movement, in which the cars nearly blur into abstraction. Accompanied by voiceovers in German, and Spanish, describing automobile performance, the work seeks to distill the complex registers of Everson’s experience, and the dangled promise of ownership into an abstract, fleeting form.
Media
Schedule
from February 26, 2021 to March 27, 2021