Research Thursdays - Shane Eason Receives South Florida Cultural Consortium Award
Image (left): Still frame from SIN BIN | FIRST STUDY | THE GRIM REAPER (2018) a film by Shane Eason
Shane Eason, MFA, Associate Professor, Associate Director, and Multimedia Production Coordinator in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies, recently received a South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual and Media Artists Award. These awards are granted annually to preeminent South Florida artists. Eason’s award, in the amount of $15,000, will be used for his SIN BIN Series, a collection of experimental films that investigate and deconstruct professional hockey players branded as “enforcers.” Often assigned to the “Checking Line” for their careers, enforcers are responsible for shifting a game’s momentum by inciting penalties and physical altercations (fighting) against an opposing team. Through found footage, including 16 mm educational films and archival TV and radio broadcasts, the series looks to embellish the sport’s intersections of hockey culture, violence and masculinity.
SIN BIN | FIRST STUDY | THE GRIM REAPER (2018), the first film in the series, and so far exhibited at FRACTO Experimental Film Encounter (Berlin, Germany), International Festival of Winter Cinema (Edmonton, AB), Unexposed-Single Frame (Durham, NC), Biennial Faculty Art Exhibition (Boca Raton, FL), and the Small Cinemas Conference (Boca Raton, FL), focuses on Stu Grimson, a feared enforcer that bounced from team to team in the Western Hockey League (WHL), Canadian Interuniversity Athletics Union (CIAU), International Hockey League (IHL), and the National Hockey League (NHL), spanning a career from 1982-2002. Since his retirement in 2002, Grimson has been advocating that hockey end fighting, believing it to be a threat to the physical and mental health of the players. Consequently, SIN BIN | SECOND STUDY | THE BOOGEYMAN, a continuation of the sport’s intersections of hockey culture, violence and masculinity, and on pace to be completed fall 2020, will focus on NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard, who died at 28 from a drug and alcohol overdose while recovering from a concussion. Following his death, a posthumous examination of his brain was conducted and found evidence that he suffered from CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, common in athletes engaged in contact sports.
“The game of hockey is rich with history, culture, and tradition, and every era of the game offers unwavering memories for a fan. What remains consistent throughout is the sights and sounds, the speed and finesse, the gamesmanship and teamwork, the grit and pain, the handshakes and fistfights.”– Shane Eason, MFA, Associate Professor, School of Communication and Multimedia Studies
The South Florida Cultural Consortium awards are among the largest such honors accorded by local arts agencies to visual and media artists in the United States. Celebrating 32 years in 2020, the SFCC has awarded more than $4 million in grants to more than 300 artists. In addition to receiving the grant, the artists will take part in an exhibition at the Nova Southeastern University Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale, with an anticipated opening in October 2020. The South Florida Cultural Consortium is funded with the support of the Boards of County Commissioners of Broward, Martin, Miami-Dade and Monroe Counties, and the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County.
Shane Eason is an award-winning filmmaker, curator, and educator. His formal experimental and documentary films are conscience studies in the discourse of abstraction, memory, and identity. Spanning 20+ years, his catalog of films have been exhibited and distributed worldwide, receiving a number of awards and recognitions. Aside from the SIN BIN series, some of his most recent films, PAPA, ASCEND + DESCEND, Mangroves, He Sees Dead People, etc., have screened at Madrid International Film Festival (Madrid, Spain), Jerome Indie Film & Music Festival (Jerome, AZ), Key West Film Festival (Key West, FL), Twisted Oyster Film & New Media Art Festival (Chicago, IL & Kefalonia, Greece), RPM Film Festival (Boston, MA), Screen 2019-CLIMATES (Amherst, MA), and Fågelbo Film Festival (Fort Lauderdale, FL). Furthermore, Shane Eason directs and curates the 1:1 Super 8 Cinema Soirée and the Flamingo Film Festival and has received a number of grants for his films from the National Film Board of Canada, Canada Council for the Arts, Main Film, Interbay Cinema Society, SaskFilm, and the Saskatchewan Filmpool Cooperative. Recent internal awards from FAU include the PJHR, Morrow Fund and SCAF, which was granted to Eason for ROCKETS’ RED GLARE, an experimental-documentary feature in production and based on Jean Baudrillard’s America, a travel diary written in 1986 when Ronald Reagan was president, whereas “America” is perceived as an abstract country, elaborately draped around a scattering of themes including wealth, vastness, and the speed at which people move, live and die. Chaotic and obtrusive manmade structures contrast with the mystical and natural landscapes of the American Southwest reflecting upon current American values, popular culture, topography and politics, all provocative accounts of an obsessional society.
For more information on Eason’s work, visit fau.edu/artsandletters/scms/faculty/eason
