Windsor, ON / Detroit, MI — Media City Film Festival (MCFF), Windsor-Detroit’s internationally acclaimed festival for film and digital art and Art Windsor-Essex (AWE) announce the launch of MOONSHINE: The Celestial Films of Kevin Jerome Everson, the first solo gallery exhibition in Canada of internationally acclaimed American artist, filmmaker, and Heinz Award recipient Kevin Jerome Everson.

MOONSHINE, installed at Art Windsor-Essex June 15 – October 1, 2023, represents the first time that the artist’s complete body of astral-focussed films are presented together. The exhibition offers visitors a rare chance to experience Everson’s cinematic renderings documenting the shape, surface, and spatio-temporal movements of stellar objects, tracing their revolutionary and cosmic cycles and capturing brief and brilliant encounters between lunar and solar bodies.

MOONSHINE brings together six works: Rough and Unequal: Oceanus Procellarum (2017), Polly One (2018), Polly Two (2018), Condor (2019), Black Vulture (2021) and the world premiere of the artist’s most recent lunar study, Thirty-Seven Degrees (2023).

Born in Mansfield, Ohio, Kevin Jerome Everson has completed more than 200 films since 1997, quietly assembling one of the most remarkable collections of contemporary African American life ever committed to cinema. He has received mid-career film retrospectives at Cinéma du Réel/Centre Pompidou (2019), Tate Modern (2017), the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Media City Film Festival (2011). His works are collective by the Academy Film Archive and many institutions internationally.

Globally recognized for his prolific body of films that poignantly explore the concepts of labour and work, the artist’s engagement with astronomical bodies as subject in his moving image practice began with a commission from the University of Virginia, intended to celebrate Black History Month. As stated by Dr. Terri Francis: ”Through Everson’s eyes, we share the perspective of a black artist following his curiosity and craft. Informed by conceptual art and realism, Everson’s work in moving images involves abstraction and reflexivity, and it is precisely, if ironically, the lack of cultural specificity or personal reference that centres blackness in a universal experience all of us can enjoy.”

Everson once sarcastically remarked, “Do the privileged powers also own the moon and the sun?” In this era of for-profit space exploration, this remains an open question. MCFF and AWE invite you to shift your gaze and contemplate the multitude of answers found in the space of this special exhibition.

Media Contact: Oona Mosna, MCFF Artistic Director: mediacity@houseoftoast.ca

About MCFF: Media City Film Festival is an international festival of film and digital art dedicated to the creation, exhibition, and dissemination of the cinematic arts in Windsor–Detroit. MCFF is made possible with generous core funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, along with support from project funders, private donors, sponsors, partners, members, audiences, artists, and viewers like you.

Image credit (top): MOONSHINE installation view at Art Windsor-Essex courtesy Media City Film Festival © Oona Mosna.

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