Colonial Debris-Shanty Town
Tatum’s series of images assume the serial format of reproducible posters, invoking through its title the various psychological and material legacies of colonialism within a Caribbean context. For the artist, this residual ‘debris’—keepsake items, documentary imagery, and souvenir trinkets—serves to perpetuate entrenched narratives around Caribbean identity, reflecting the ways in which this visual material is ultimately perceived and interpreted through the voyeuristic lens of the tourist gaze. Deploying a sophisticated visual vocabulary, Tatum offers an insightful commentary on the commodification of island cultures whose true nature is all too often misunderstood.
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).
