\nMissing Attachment\nMissing Attachment\nMissing Attachment\nMissing Attachment\nMissing Attachment\nMissing Attachment\nMissing Attachment\nMissing Attachment\n

Intermission: Where did you grow up?

Jeremy Everett: I grew up in a small town in Colorado. It’s the kind of place that has no past, no future, and the only monument is the road that passes through it. There is incredible freedom in the West with piles of material forgotten and abandoned, expanses of nothing, and unbelievable landscapes where the natural processes are still alive.

IM: Where did you go to school?

JE: I studied landscape architecture in Colorado and within that I encountered works by Smithson and Heizer—earthworks that I could instantly relate to but not explain. These works gave me a way in to a larger understanding of contemporary art. Then I attended a graduate interdisciplinary studio practice with Bruce Mau in Toronto.

IM: When did you decide to become an artist?

JE: I never decided; I didn’t even know it was a possibility. Through working in my studio I came at it from a very different direction and found it.

IM: What are you working on right now?

JE: For the last six months I have abandoned all representation and any connection to a traditional studio. I left NYC with a pack full of basic raw materials to make work and the basic needs such as clothing and portable shelter. I began to drift. I buried a stereo in Woodstock NY that will play the same song on repeat for the entire summer. I borrowed a boat to install a large stack of paper (similar to a buoy) that floats and sinks in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. The 
collected photographs and blank sheets will become a book called Atlas.
I hitchhiked around Iceland and its wide spaces for a few weeks working on a set of drawings on blankets called No Exit. The title came to me when I completely ran out of money in the most remote northern corner of the country and was stuck without food for a few days. Then to Paris where I worked for a good part of the year. Then a very long stay in Sri Lanka working on drawings inspired by the philosophical lines of Claude Levi-Strauss book Sad Tropics.

IM: What materials do you prefer to work with?

JE: It is about experimentation and adventure for me—I am interested in materials that have a vocabulary with society on a visual level, a relationship with as well as a rejection of any authority.
I enjoy marks of conflict, marks of removal, or marks from growth.

IM: How would you describe your aesthetics?

JE: There is a directness of experience to response, a rejection of anything formal beyond primitive.  All the work is vulnerable. I am vulnerable. I am responding to everything around me, I am a document.

IM: Where do you dream of exhibiting your work?

JE: I just exhibited a work buried underground and one is floating in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. It would be great inside peoples’ secrets.

IM: What is your own favorite artwork?

JE: The work that fails.

IM: Whose work do you admire?

JE: Samuel Beckett.

IM: What is your favorite artwork from another artist?

JE: Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty.

IM: Whom would you like to work with?

JE: I am collaborating on a written project with a priest, a car salesman, my mom, an art critic, a fortune-teller and a lawyer. It is going to be interesting if it is ever done.

IM: How do you experience the art scene in general at the moment?

JE: It is wide open—a scene without a movement.

IM: How do you look at your own work?

JE: I look at each work as a sentence fragment released into the world with precise abandon.

IM: Does it hold a message?

JE: Each piece is unique as I am continually learning to exist in the world through this sensitive documentation. The pieces are visual results, evidence of physically belonging, the rejection of a
stratified system, the rejection of any authority.

IM: How do you see the artist as a critic of society?

JE: Time is the most interesting critic.

IM: What is your own role as an artist?

JE: To find the visual points of pressure: the fountains, filters and drains and communicate them through my work.

IM: What is your dream?

JE: To visually move beyond a level of understanding.

IM: Where do you see your work going in the future?

JE: I want to avoid prediction or repetition.

IM: What has been influential regarding your visual language?

JE: My vocabulary is deeply affected by moments of clarity I have while participating. I was on a long climb with my brother and we were stuck at a high altitude in a violent lightning storm. All of the rocks were physically buzzing and the only way we could hide from the electricity was to jam our bodies in the tiny crevices to avoid being struck by lightning. It was absolutely insane to feel the electricity in the air go through my body, hair on end and be completely out of control. So raw and direct, such experiences influence my favorite work.
Understanding and releasing the burden of history through work has also been influential: I was in Paris digging up decay drawings that I made from burying the Louvre—they are incredible studies in color reduction and mark making. Another moment was when I found a ghost town and abandoned marble mine that was used to produce almost all major American monuments and headstones. It is the perfect defect that is just sitting and quietly falling out of the earth.

IM: Where do you go to find peace?

JE: When I let go.