NADA HOUSE 2024

Featuring Simon Benjamin

September 6th - October 27th 2024

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Simon Benjamin: “A Bolt from the Blue” presented at NADA House on Governors Island. The exhibition continues Benjamin’s geographical research of the sea and island regions as interconnected sites of colonial legacy. Through video installation and sculpture we are immersed in visual and auditory vocabularies that convene relational coastal histories alongside material objects of inquiry.

Benjamin’s work can be understood through a Caribbean lens, where his practices have directly engaged with the impacts on local coastal cultures on the island of Jamaica. His installations have since expanded into further inquiries of relational waterway cultures around the world, from the islands of the North Atlantic to the Mediterranean, and most recently in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, while a resident at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery in Seattle, Washington.

The artist's work is also informed by the writings and poetry of Édouard Glissant (Martinique) and Kamau Brathwaite (Barbados), both of whom offer critical examinations to the meaning of place as both a paradise and a site of historical and daily survival. Benjamin’s work functions in conversation with elders of the Caribbean, where he fabulates archival imagery and field research for his work in painting and includes community storytelling as citational elements for his video installation Sycorax_VideoStyle_03.

The video installation is in conversation with Barrel, South Coast, a sculpture comprised of collected coastal detritus samples from the south coast of Jamaica, which is cast in cornmeal and sand, building on his ongoing CORE series of sculptures. The CORE series acts as a geo-colonial time signature, where the land is the archive, revealing gaps in the narrative of the Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch defined by human impact on the earth. These samples attend to interrelated concerns related to disruptive losses in regional biodiversity and its social impact on community life and sustainability in multiple archipelago cultures.

“The first dark shadow was cast by being wrenched from their everyday, familiar land, away from protecting gods and a tutelary community. But that is nothing yet. Exile can be borne, even when it comes as a bolt from the blue.” ~Edouard Glissant

Simon Benjamin (b. 1979, St. Andrew, Jamaica) is a Jamaican multi-disciplinary artist and filmmaker based in New York, whose practice considers how the past ripples into the present in unexpected ways. Using the sea and coastal space as frameworks, his current body of work explores how lesser-known histories and colonial legacies impact on our present and contribute to an interconnected future. Benjamin is a 2023 New York City Artadia Awardee, and a 2023-4 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Awardee, New York, NY. His work has been included in exhibitions and screening internationally, including documenta 15, Kassel, Germany (2022); Kingston Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2022); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Governor’s Island, NY; Third Horizon film Festival, Miami, FL (2022); trinidad+tobago film festival, Trinidad and Tobago (2021); NYU Gallatin at Governors Island, New York, NY (2021); The 92nd St. Y, New York, NY (2020); Hunter East Harlem Gallery, New York, NY (2019); the Ghetto Biennial, Port Au Prince, Haiti (2018); Jamaica Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2017); New Local Space, (NLS) Kingston (2016); and Columbia University, New York, NY (2016). Benjamin earned his MFA from Hunter College in New York in 2021.