Exhibition – Jen Everett: Come Through

Rivalry Projects is thrilled to present Come Through, a solo exhibition of new works by St. Louis-based artist Jen Everett.

Working in collage, installation, and time-based media, Jen Everett explores the relationship between Black interiority, knowledge production, and rupture – an ongoing state of historical, social, and financial upheaval. Vernacular images are at the core of her practice as she collects photographs and objects inherited from family, materials from thrift stores, as well as deaccessioned library books, records, speakers, and other media equipment, to expand upon what constitutes an archive and explore what can be communicated through seemingly quotidian moments. By gathering and re-configuring these images and materials, Everett aims to compel closer readings and offer alternative representations of Blackness. She refuses spectacular depictions, and instead utilizes these materials to amplify the everyday cultivation of beauty in the face of immense structural limitations.

This exhibition will include new sculptural and photographic works, set against the backdrop of large-scale vinyl installation of a 1980s wood-paneled interior with its record collection, family photographs, and folks gathered on the floor slightly out of the frame. Featuring works from Everett’s ongoing series Redoubled/Something We Carry and Unheard Sounds, Come Through, the former centers the collection of vernacular photographs and celebrates the technology of the photo album, and the latter explores knowledge production and transmission through evolving installations of sonic materials.

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Jen Everett (b. 1981, Detroit, MI) is an artist and educator based in Saint Louis, Missouri. Her practice moves between lens and time based media, installation and writing. Jen received an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis where she was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts. She earned a Bachelor of Architecture from Tuskegee University. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally at The Saint Louis Art Museum, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Krannert Art Museum, SCAD Museum of Art, and Kunsthall Stavanger, among many others. She has presented her work during lectures and workshops at the Saint Louis Art Museum, Black Portraitures – Harvard University, and the Luminary. She currently lectures in the photography department at Washington University in St. Louis. Jen recently served as a teaching artist at the Contemporary Art museum. Her work has been published in Oxford American, Color Theory (Wolfman Books, 2019) and Undertow (Silent Face Projects, 2018). Jen has been an artist in residence at the Fire Island Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts and ACRE. She was a 2021-22 Duke University DocX Archive Lab fellow. Her work resides in the public collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) at Columbia College – Chicago.