These images are from my MFA thesis exhibit for the Sculpture and Expanded Media programme at Kent State University. The exhibition titled the Romantic Caribbean was installed at the CVA Gallery at Kent State University from 21 March-27 March 2021.

Statement:

As a person born and partially raised on a small island in the English-speaking Caribbean, I have grown interested in investigating ideas around identity politics and cultural exchange within my visual art practice. My interests have led me to focus on the subjects of tourism and trade within my current research. One purpose of my current research is to expose commonplace representations of island culture that were created from fantasies of the romantic Caribbean destination. I want to reveal how particular representations encouraged leisure activities and oftentimes promiscuous behavior from tourists. Another purpose of my research is to show how fantasy images survive through tourist advertisement strategies, keepsake items and film. I want my research to engage in discussion about how tourist exchanges, between western cultures and the cultures on Caribbean islands, create systems of cross-pollination. Systems that influence cultures of varying distances to share aesthetics by trading items and trading images that they associate with value and beauty.

The artworks within this exhibit incorporate found materials made of ceramic, dried flowers, dried grass, metal, plaster, wood and wax . All these materials I gather from specified locations. Most recently, I have been gathering found materials from my place of residence, which is Ohio, USA. I also use other elements within my current visual art practice. I make hand-built ceramic fragments, plaster casts, surface decals and overglazes. These elements are edited with found materials to make mixed media trophies. The trophies are decorative items with simple functional purposes. For my thesis exhibit, the functional purpose of the trophies were to serve as holders or containers for candles, cigarillos and incense.

In addition to my sculptural objects, I use collected screen shots from the 1974 romantic thriller movie, The Tamarind Seed, and I use collected images from my international travel to different countries. The supplementary digital elements are turned into banners, graphics and video projections. For my thesis exhibit, these digital elements were placed around my trophies to create installations. My choice to place banners, graphics and video in conjunction with the trophies is a technique inspired by an advertisement strategy. The technique is used at duty free shops on my home island, Grand Cayman. The shops will display valuable items like Rolex watches in store front windows and place plastic banners outside the store that show celebrities like George Clooney or Keira Knightley wearing the jewelry. This advertisement technique was created to build credibility and expose the jewelry to new markets. For my trophies, this mimicked technique of digital media creates credibility through a sense of historic authenticity of my newly manufactured objects, and it exposes the objects to new viewers by their association to the digital media. Further, the trophies in conjunction with the digital media illustrate ideas about how cultural identity can hybridize through the influence of exchange systems like tourism, and they illustrate how keepsake items will create complex narratives about the travel destinations they are associated with versus the manufactured and collected locations of the materials.

Colonial Debris is an ongoing series of work that I started in 2022. I created a new installation for the series during the In Relations exhibit that opened at Tern Gallery in February 2024.

The Colonial Debris installation shares images of 7 different created icons- the Priest, the Black Angels, the Columns, the Torsos, the Banker, the Mahogany, and the Drummer. Each image is made from hand drawing and hand painting. I complete each image by placing a final layer of graphite screen print on top of the paintings. The whole process of making these new images, references hand painted photographs that were previously used for tourist postcards. Each figure made within this series has become one of my new icons for the Caribbean region, thinking about new icons that can emerge from the colonial debris.

“The In Relation exhibit at Tern Gallery was a group exhibit featuring Caribbean artists, Gherdai Hassell, Simon Tatum, and Drew Weech. It brought together three practices from the Anglophone Caribbean to illuminate intimacy within the personal and the political.” -Jodi Minnis

Artworks from the Colonial Debris series are now available for purchase with Tern Gallery. If you are interested in finding out more details, reach out to them directly (link: https://www.terngallery.com/projects-with/simon-tatum).

The artwork in this series was inspired from my graduate thesis research and its investigation into tantalizing ideas of a Caribbean fantasy destination. The artworks take the form of archival inkjet prints on paper, designed through both analog and digital methods of image layering and registration. The content for the posters reference printed pamphlets that were commissioned by hotels in Grand Cayman in the 1960s and 1970s from a Miami based advertisement company. These pamphlets were made during the first major tourist influx in Grand Cayman and important tools for attracting tourists to the island for vacation getaways.

As I have made these prints, I have chosen to combine elements scanned from the original 1960s and 1970s tourist pamphlets for Grand Cayman with other visual elements. Elements I have collected from other printed materials like books, magazines (like National Geographic), ect. The imagery I sourced for the first set of posters ( titled: “Ancient Charm with Modern Convenience” and “See Your Travel Agent”) include tropical vegetation from contemporary tourist magazines for Grand Cayman, Spanish and Catalan ceramics from museum catalogs, and a fragment of a portrait bust from an Oceanic culture (also collected from a museum catalog). The second set of prints ( titled: “Winter Haven Homes” and “Buccaneers Inn”) incorporate an alternate arrangement of visual elements. They include snippets from 1970’s National Geographic articles covering islands in the Caribbean, African Nations and Central and South American nations. I chose snippets from articles that focused on the poverty and “re-development” of these nations and juxtaposed them with other snippets from advertisements in the same National Geographic magazine. Snippets from advertisements for luxury home renovations, home insurance, luxury vehicles, collectable coins, and Caribbean resorts.

Image 1: “Ancient Charm with Modern Convenience”, 2021. Archival inkjet print on paper.

Image 2: “See Your Travel Agent”, 2019. Archival inkjet print on paper.

Image 3: “Ancient Charm with Modern Convenience”, 2021. Digital collage printed on archival paper, framed. 50x 38 in or 127 x 98 cm.

Image 4: “ See Your Travel Agent”, 2019. Digital collage printed on archival paper, framed. 50x 38 in or 127 x 98 cm.

Image 5: Image of “Ancient Charm with Modern Convenience” and “See Your Travel Agent” hung in the permanent collection of the Ritz Carlton, Grand Cayman.

Image 6: Image of “Ancient Charm with Modern Convenience” and “See Your Travel Agent” hung in the permanent collection of the Ritz Carlton, Grand Cayman.

Image 7: “Winter Haven”, 2022. Archival inkjet print on paper.

Image 8: “Buccaneers Inn”, 2022. Archival inkjet print on paper.

Image 9: “Winter Haven” and “Buccaneers Inn” printed and mounted in Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad. Image courtesy of Kriston Chen.

Colonial Debris is an ongoing series of work that I started in 2022. I created new prints on paper for the series during the In Relations exhibit that opened at Tern Gallery in February 2024. The new prints on paper are titled “The Musicians”.

The Colonial Debris series shares images of different created icons- the Priest, the Black Angels, the Columns, the Torsos, the Banker, the Mahogany, the Drummer, the Musicians. The Musicians are archival inkjet prints on paper that are designed from images I have taken from collected figurines, combined with designed backgrounds made by disassembling and reassembling scans of old tourist advertisements and documentary imagery of the Cayman Islands (my place of birth). One of the Musician figurines is a black plastic cherub who plays the viola. The other Musician figurine is a pair of wooden men playing the bagpipes. Both types of musicians alluding to the musical tools of European cultures that were brought into the Caribbean region.

Each figure made through this process has become one of my new icons for the Caribbean region, thinking about new icons that can emerge from the colonial debris. The Musicians are archival inkjet prints placed on hahnemuhle paper; each print is 20 x 30 inches ( 51 x 76 cm).

Also included with the prints is a ceramic sculpture with gold luster titled “The Music Player”. The ceramic sculpture contains a mini bluetooth speaker inside of it that plays an audio track on loop. The audio was made by my collaborator and Nashville based audio producer, Haru Sayso. The title of the audio track is titled “All I Need”.

“The In Relation exhibit at Tern Gallery was a group exhibit featuring Caribbean artists, Gherdai Hassell, Simon Tatum, and Drew Weech. It brought together three practices from the Anglophone Caribbean to illuminate intimacy within the personal and the political. Each artist grounds their work in personal anecdotes that push their audience to the ever-present politics of our existence within the Global North; however, they allow tenderness and intimacy to remain in place. “In Relation” gave breath to this dichotomy.” -Jodi Minnis

Artworks from the Colonial Debris series are now available for purchase with Tern Gallery. If you are interested in finding out more details, reach out to them directly (link: https://www.terngallery.com/exhibitions/in-relation ).

The Seven Travelers audio and video series (2022) is a recent collaborative project between Nashville-based rapper and music producer, Haru Sayso and Simon Tatum. The project is a series of audios and video narratives that have been combined together to create a short visual album. The audios created by Haru Sayso were responses to a self-given prompt “what is under the ocean”. A prompt that follows Sayso’s continued interest in people finding personal truth through journeys and self-reflection. Sayso’s audios are layered beats that try to provoke a sense of departure from one place to another, or one mental state to another, or one emotional state to another. Following Sayso’s concept, Simon Tatum created video narratives that speak about the self-reflections of seven travelers. These narratives are partly inspired by stories told to Tatum by elderly family members, and partly inspired by Caribbean based films from the 1970s like The Harder they Come and The Tamarind Seed.

As often mentioned, my interests are closely linked with my background as an individual who was born and partially raised in Grand Cayman, a small island in the English-speaking Caribbean. My interests have led me to use a process of drawing that transforms found materials like decorative ceramic plates. The process involves transferring my hand-drawn sketches into overglaze gold graphics through digitally manipulated vinyl decals. I intended to transform the decorative plates within my drawing process to appropriate a found material that is commonly associated with keepsake items.

With the drawing compositions, I have focused on depictions of male characters shown in intimate moments or moments of self-reflection. These depictions of males are accompanied by the existing graphics of flowers that are on the decorative plates, making my drawn figures appear as if they are in garden scenes. The drawing compositions reference scenes from Star Trek, a popular sci fi series, and scenes from Smile Orange, a satirical film from the 1980s that critically analyzed the effect of tourism on Black males working in a Jamaican tourist resort. I was interested in both these source materials throughout 2021 because they showed me representations of males (particularly Black males) expressing complex narratives through their emotions and moments of reflection. I found these narratives inspiring and mesmerizing. Moreover, I have redrawn selected moments from these narratives and mixed in some of my own self-portraits, adding myself into these emotional narratives. I want these drawings to be compound representations of male intimacy, self-reflection, and provocation, contrasting the figurative narratives and pastoral scenes usually depicted on delftware or chinaware ceramics.