Brooklyn, New York & Georgetown, South Carolina
Documentary Film, Video Art

Jon-Sesrie Goff inherited a plot of land on the Santee River in South Carolina and began to travel home to make a body of work about it, when the experimental film he had set out to make was violently interrupted in 2015. After Sherman + A Site of Reckoning is about American inheritance. The coastal south is both a source of great pride, rich with cultural legacies that endure, as well as the site of years fraught with subjugation. It is a site of reckoning, begging the question: can peace be made with the physical site of both bondage and heritage? This conundrum is at the heart of constant return to South Carolina in Goff’s practice. This project, like the Gullah people (descendants of enslaved Africans), seeks to hold many identities spoken through a single tongue. It is both a record, in conversation with institutional archives, and a signifier to that which cannot be seen.

Jon-Sesrie Goff is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and arts administrator. With extensive experience in media and film production, Goff has offered his lens to a variety of projects spanning many genres including the recently released and award-winning documentaries, Out in the Night (POV, Logo 2015), Evolution of a Criminal (Independent Lens 2015), and Spit on the Broom (2019). His personal practice has involved extensive archival research, visual documentation, and oral history interviews in the coastal south on the legacy of Black land ownership and Gullah Geechee heritage preservation.