Cultural Consortium Award

Shane Eason, MFA, recently received the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium (SFCC) Visual and Media Artists award for his Sin Bin series, a collection of experimental films that investigate and deconstruct professional hockey players branded as enforcers.

Eason is an associate professor, associate director and multimedia production coordinator in the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. These $15,000 awards are granted annually to preeminent South Florida artists.

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 in Berlin, Germany, International Festival of Winter Cinema in Alberta, Canada Unexposed-Single Frame in Durham, N.C., Biennial Faculty Art Exhibition and the Small Cinemas Conference both in, Boca Raton, Fla., focuses on Stu Grimson, a feared enforcer that bounced from team to team in the Western Hockey League, Canadian Interuniversity Athletics Union, International Hockey League 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, chronic traumatic encephalopathy, common in athletes engaged in contact sports.

The SFCC 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, Fla., with an anticipated opening in October 2020. The SFCC 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.

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 more than 20 years, his catalog of films have been exhibited and distributed worldwide, receiving a number of awards and recognitions.

For more information on Eason's work, click here.

– Story courtesy of Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters