Jen Everett: Kinship, Interiority & the Black Femme Gaze

Outside Jen Everett’s studio, balmy air collects against warm St. Louis bricks, but my summer sweat is instantly soothed as I pass through a cool corridor and into a realm of collected images and photographs. A mass of photo albums, stacked, bears load, absorbing soft hums of 80s melodies, muffled and gentle, from a speaker in the adjacent room. Everett invites me into her space, offering tea and generosity.

Residing and working in St. Louis, MO, Everett creates images, installations, and sonic productions through processes of archiving, photography, and assemblage. She engages the world around her by gathering-with and seeing-with generational familial archival artifacts found in photo albums, home videos, and cared-for-objects from local antique and vintage shops. These found Afro-diasporic objects also include images of Black subjects who have traveled through various places and times, eventually landing in dusty corners of secondhand shops. Seeing, listening, and carefully gathering vernacular images, Everett forms nuanced and intimate work that unfolds Black diasporic kinship, links cross-temporal knowledges and lived experiences. Everett encodes gestures and intentional styling of environment, and she carries these reverberations into her assemblage works.

Everett offers an image of a living room bathed in shades of warm brown and grounded with carpeted floors underneath melanated skin. Bodies congregate, their gaze disregarding, or perhaps unaware of, the camera’s lens. Resting yet attentive, one figure leans back, styled with a cap and Adidas tee. Framed family photos atop transparent glass shelves gaze back from the image, protecting the collection of vinyl and huddled speakers. The photo is inherited, taken by Everett’s late father “in the early 80s during a trip to Memphis Tennessee to see extended family,” she shares.

Everett’s process reckons with remembrance and change, rolling with time after moments of rupture. Meditating on the intimacy and construction of Black interior landscapes and gatherings linked by the shared experience of sonic enjoyment, Everett positions and fashions found artifacts with her installation Unheard Sounds, Come Through (2019–ongoing). Her process takes the re-looking and re-listening of images and sounds and alchemizes them into spatial and visual communication.

Reading the work and method for Unheard Sounds, Come Through, I feel an alive and transformative closing of distance between Everett’s cared-for images and found objects, which live within a larger archive that is Black, holding kin, both the living and the deceased, peoples and environments, past and present/future. The assembled found objects are no longer physically detached and isolated, accumulating dust and unacknowledged, but instead are acknowledged, linked, and weaved into a poetic relation of solidarity.

In the multi-act installation, Everett works through a series of assemblages. Cassette tapes are stacked atop a speaker, a vinyl record propped upside-down behind them. A Black female figure, unwithholding, gazes back directly at the viewer. Iridescent bluish-graphite eye shadow glazes her upper eyelid. Her lashes, subtly coated in mascara, strikingly frame her entrancing regard. Her mouth is seductively open, her tongue flicked upward, playfully capturing focus in the frame. A transistor radio has been meticulously placed in front of her deep brown pupil. The sculpture plays with angularity against a repetition of circles and curves. Combined with the faded tones of printed matter, the purposefully placed artifacts play with the viewer through the woman’s sensual expression. The perfectly aligned device, layered in front of a singular eye emphasizes seeing, pulling in the gaze, and inviting an active look back and forth. Cassette cases holding sounds—Janet Jackson’s “Control,” MC Lyte’s “Eyes on This,” and TLC’s “CrazySexyCool,” and others—are stacked to the left, framing the visage and referencing late 80s and 90s sonic waves.

Everett performs improvisation in the process of making and embraces a process of change as the tender objects are rearranged. A new day and situation, the record is largely obscured by large slide carousels, perhaps containing family photographs. A deep navy blue Airequipt box and large slide carousels deliberately obscure the gaze of the woman on the album. Withdrawn and seductive, her view is now shielded, suggestively redirecting viewers’ voyeuristic gaze to her mouth, and, perhaps, to the images held in the carousel. Mundane, rich, and aged brown vinyl organizers stand to the left of the sleeve, forming a gentle plinth for a cassette case. Spatially conscious, the codified arrangement of objects communicates the habitual change, adjustment, and attentiveness within this, and many other, Black interior worlds.

At the other end of this installation sits, exploded, a deconstruction: an isolated transistor radio rests at the foreground, and movement is suggested by a blown-out speaker, similar to an axonometric drawing. The sculpture exudes its layers and complexities, exposing its interior, its beige and black tones framed upward and away from the light-cast walls, atop a tan-tone foundation. The viewer is now aware of its unseen elements, kinetic and multidimensional. Everett crafts nuanced context with the insurgence of the sonic, activating frequency within the installation through the inclusion of sounds from home videos. The focused and assembled sculptural forms and aural displays resist a flattening of place, space, or social content.

Everett’s work and practice are intimate and quiet, articulating a glimpse into a Black imaginary—personal, subjective, and yet still, collective. A fragment within the constellation of Black interiority, ritual is formed with precise improvisation, through Everett’s studious placing, organizing, and composing of new worlds that reverb and recall the interiors and homes of her older kin. Playing with the gaze, resisting flatness, and showcasing agency, Everett re-presents, performs, and acknowledges radiant Black knowledge production. Rigorously sitting and listening with collected images and objects, Everett marks and self-historicizes the deep and local, witnessing, remembering, and building relation with quotidian Black histories, past, now, and always emerging.¹

Tomi Seyi Laja (b. 1996 Ibadan) is an American architectural designer, researcher, and essayist currently based in Berlin, by way of Chicago. Her research-based practice prioritizes poetics to explore spatial themes on formalism, agency and sensuality. A graduate of Harvard Graduate School of Design, she is a Fulbright recipient for independent research and Guest Editor of the third issue of Disc Journal: Media, Technology, Environments. She has worked with Park Books, the Graham Foundation, The Funambulist Magazine, Storefront Art & Architecture, and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), amongst others.