This month has brought exciting news from two of Cayman’s overseas artists, Simon Tatum and Davin Ebanks, both of whom are currently pursuing their professional careers in the United States. Simon Tatum, a second-year MFA candidate in the Studio Art Department at Kent State University in Ohio, took part in an emerging artist talk with the Sculpture X Symposium on 5 February— a teaching and networking platform that explores cutting-edge developments in the field of contemporary sculpture and beyond. The symposium was hosted virtually by Edinboro University, Pennsylvania, with Tatum one of five emerging artists from around the region (encompassing the Northeast and Midwest United States) selected to participate in this year’s exciting programme.
Tatum’s presentation offered an overview of the artist’s portfolio and general discussion of his practice— which is both critically sophisticated and conceptually complex, while still retaining a strong affinity for drawing and more traditional forms of representation. Simon completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Missouri, receiving a BA degree in Fine Art with a minor in Art History in 2017. On commencing graduate studies at Kent State University, Tatum elected to pursue a specialisation in Sculpture and Expanded Media, a decision which has greatly influenced the body of work he has produced over the course of the past eighteen months. Building on past projects—including the artist’s solo exhibition Looking Back and Thinking Ahead, which was held in NGCI’s Community Gallery in 2017— Tatum’s latest artistic investigations are titled Souvenirs From America (2020) and Couples (2020). Collectively, these twin projects form the basis of his MFA thesis research, which explores the hybrid space between different media: namely photography and drawing, as well as various printing techniques and alternative forms of presentation that challenge the conventions of institutional display.
Part two-dimensional drawings and part spatial installation, the works in these respective series depict a variety of subjects— from plant imagery and luxuriant foliage that recalls the iconography of the artist’s earlier Tropical Forms (2018), to notable figures from black history and popular culture— extending Tatum’s ongoing preoccupation with Caribbean identity and the question of cultural representation. In a similar fashion to the wall-mounted, paper tendrils of the Tropical Forms series, which was installed at NGCI for the exhibition Tropical Visions in 2019, the imagery in Souvenirs From America appears to grow out from the rectilinear confines of the frame itself, which becomes less a container for the two-dimensional charcoal drawings than an intrinsic element of the larger installation—a spatial arrangement that activates the surrounding gallery wall as a vital appendage of the work’s structural configuration. The use of vinyl graphics adhered directly to the wall similarly shifts the discrete space in which these drawings operate, transforming the neutral ground of the gallery (traditionally conceived within the modernist paradigm as a pristine ‘white cube’) into an extension of the paper support—becoming, in effect, a receptive and dynamic surface for artistic expression.
Acclaimed glass sculptor and Kent State University Assistant Professor Davin Ebanks’ new solo showcase, Nowhere is Blue, opened at the Sculpture Center in Cleveland, USA on January 29, 2021. The exhibition features several new works which the artist has developed over the past two years, furthering Ebanks’ exploration of his chosen medium, as well as his ongoing investigations into questions of race and cultural identification. While identity and the artist’s own Caymanian heritage have long been a feature of Ebanks’ sculptural practice, these thematic explorations have taken on even greater significance in light of the social justice movements that have accelerated awareness around questions of race and the politics of personal identity over the course of the past year.
Says the artist: “my sculptures are metaphors for the subjective nature of identity and personal narrative. I use everyday elements from the island culture where I was raised—ripe bananas, woven baskets, ocean water, etc.—and by translating these subjects into glass they are elevated from the mundane to the aesthetic. The colour blue has been important to my work for a while, but specifically as representative of water from the coastline of Grand Cayman. For this new body of work, I pointedly researched the metaphorical and historical relevance of blue. Although still referential, the pieces are more suggestive of open space (water and sky) or as liminal space where they meet. This is the blue seen through the open window or porthole: everywhere, yet nowhere”.
The significance of the exhibition’s title Nowhere is Blue, becomes all the more explicit on closer examination of several of the works Ebanks’ selected for this solo showcase. Passages Tryptic (2021), for instance, is a meditation on colour and the myriad allusions it holds within a Caribbean cultural context, as the artist further elaborates: “recently I’ve been thinking about bodies moving through blue spaces. As a Caymanian-American my racial identity is linked to Black people who didn’t make it all the way across the Atlantic, a people left stranded in the blue space of the Caribbean. The idea of transporting produce and commodities”, Ebanks states, “ became a metaphor for the transportation of bodies through the blue space between places—from the transatlantic slave trade to trade wars to our current refugee crises”.
In another recent work, Ground Basket Pair (2021), the artist elevates these humble, utilitarian forms to the status of precious commodities. In place of the natural texture of woven silver thatch, Ebanks illusionistically renders his subject in silvered glass, lending the baskets a burnished glow that seems to radiate from within. As a symbol, perhaps, of our own contemporary era, the ‘Midas touch’ that has transformed these objects into works of sculpture might also serve then to warn of the erosion of Caymanian cultural traditions— a phenomenon to which Ebanks has frequently alluded throughout the course of his artistic career.
Simon Tatum and Davin Ebanks will both be featured in NGCI’s forthcoming exhibition, Reimagined Futures—2nd Cayman Islands Biennial, which is scheduled to open on April 23, 2021.
Details of the Sculpture X Symposium and links to Simon Tatum’s virtual talk can be found here. Davin Ebanks’ solo exhibition, Nowhere is Blue, is on view at The Sculpture Center until 13 March. Further details can be found on the institution’s website here.