Tropical Form
Caymanian artist Simon Tatum’s work is concerned with the local-global negotiation of visual culture and historical dialogue. In Tropical Form, Tatum explores narratives of promoted migration caused by political matters and how such movement encourages sexual encounters and coupling between different cultural groups. The work is comprised of a series of monotone paintings designed to act as organisms that adapt to the dimensions of their exhibition space. Tatum realises that migration is historically associated with both positive and negative circumstances but feels that hybridising should be embraced. His Tropical Form symbolises this hybridisation.
About the Artist
Simon Tatum
b. 1995
Simon Tatum is currently pursuing his MFA in Sculpture and Expanded Media at Kent State University in Ohio. He completed his BA at the University of Missouri in 2017, for which he received the Cayman Islands Government Overseas Scholarship and the Deutsche Bank National Gallery Visual Arts Scholarship. Tatum’s work, which explores his Caymanian heritage, was featured in a three-artist exhibition, Evoke (Imago Gallery and Cultural Center, Columbia, Missouri, 2015) and he was selected to represent the University of Missouri in the SEC Academic Symposium’s Undergraduate and Graduate Fine Art Showcase in 2015. He has held two solo shows to date: Discover and Rediscover (2016), at the University of Missouri and Looking Back and Thinking Ahead at the National Gallery of the Cayman Islands in 2017, as well as participating in several group exhibitions, including Open Air Prisons at LACE Gallery, Los Angeles (2016) and Sense of Place at Spinnerei Halle 18 in Leipzig, Germany (2018). Tatum was part of the Caribbean Linked IV residency programme in Oranjestad, Aruba, in 2016. In addition to his 2017 solo show, Tatum’s work was featured at NGCI in the exhibitions tIDal Shift: Explorations of Identity in Contemporary Caymanian Art (2015), Speak to Me (2016), Mediating Self (2017), Upon the Seas (2017), Revive: Contemporary Caymanian Craft (2017), and Tropical Visions (2019).
