Simon Benjamin

Simon Benjamin’s sculptures, installations, photographs, and films work to elevate what he terms the “anti-tropical,” or an undoing of the myth of the Caribbean as only paradise. According to Benjamin, this work can be situated as oppositional to the images propagated by tourism promotion that follows in the legacy of the plantation economy and a broader colonial paradigm, aestheticizing Jamaica as solely a picturesque tropical paradise, positioning it ahistorically and apolitically. To counter this, Benjamin offers works based on relationality and economies of movement that construct Jamaica and the wider Caribbean as a space of labor that should be more rigorously understood. In this space of the anti-tropical, the sea’s presence echoes throughout Benjamin’s work, as ontological maker and undoer; as mover of beings; as source of nourishment and capital. The work presented in Scaffolding Time uses elements of the natural world not only as material, but as a setting in which to examine how historical and present conditions shape, for instance, a Treasure Beach fisherman’s relationship to the environment around him. Tommy Wong, a fisherman, painter, and the central figure in Benjamin’s work Erranty, is representative of a sobering wisdom about humanity’s complex relationship to sky, land, and sea. As much as we should give to and nourish the natural world, our society is built on extraction from it. Inevitably, this extraction disproportionately affects regions such as the Caribbean.

Simon Benjamin

All images courtesy the artist.

Simon Benjamin’s Website

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