The Tide Maintains its Own Pace

Commissioned Essay for Simon Benjamin’s solo presentation for The Armory Show’s Platform section, 2025. Presented by Swivel Gallery and Patron Gallery. Another essay with excerpts of this version was previously published for Benjamin’s solo presentation at EXPO Chicago 2025.

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Memories flow through the currents in a circulation of lives lived, lost and relinquished. The sea is a temporal realm moving outside linear metrics of time which are used to assess conceptions  of growth and change. Its profound depth cannot be known, and that impossibility of control stirs the thirst to keep searching. Simon Benjamin's Tidalectic No. 1 is a dialogue interwoven through connections between the land and sea. In a convergence of video and the artist’s largest core sample work to date, the sculptural installation delves into the scalar dimensions of deep time. Scanning the sea through the plexiglass of a two-channel video embedded into plywood structures, a new iteration in Benjamin’s Glass Bottom series conjures an anticipation for what may be glanced or “discovered”. Undergirding the seeming potential of “uncovering” what these waters may hold is an investment in appropriation and ownership. Our eyes are drawn through the undertow that simultaneously moves at differing speeds across each screen. The tide maintains its own pace. How can one ever claim to seek clarity in these waters? 

Contextually framing the footage filmed from the glass bottom boat off the coast of Negril, Jamaica, Benjamin alludes to commercial forces that survey underwater terrains in search of oil, minerals, and other forms of extraction. This is compounded by the ongoing climate crisis as ocean temperatures rise and destabilize ecological balance. Ominous in its ambiguity, the official three stages of deep-sea mining are prospecting, exploration and exploitation. As governments increasingly lease away permits in the never-ending scramble to find new deposits of minerals, the ocean is positioned as a frontier to be seized. This destructive drive that tears at the environmental fabric will be repaid. 

The tide rises and falls with the lunar gravitational pull, carrying material reminders that she touches coastlines of vast geographies that are often not imagined as connected. Benjamin constructs his core samples from these tidal offerings washed up on the sand, grains which become repositories for memories and the traces of passages of time. [1] A cylindrical sculpture with a mixture of beach detritus, sand, cornmeal and resin all collected at Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn, The Big Oyster, Lenapehoking, NY remembers that this has long been the ancestral lands of the Lenape. Genocide is embedded into the American colonial project, and the earth keeps score. Once known as Barren Island, artificial attempts in the 1950’s at expanding the peninsula by covering garbage with topsoil were eroded, and the waste continues to appear when the tide lowers. The wind carries the rattling sounds of unearthed glass bottles disturbed by the waves on the coast, an ongoing refusal by the bay to inhabit the manipulated form of a landfill to collect our capitalist excess. Extending almost 8 feet, the core sample gestures to geological knowledge situating this current period of society as miniscule in the face of expansive planetary histories. A black layer begins and ends the core sample, gesturing to the richness of the earth that will restore itself even as the existence of human life is increasingly precarious.  

Excerpt from Glass Bottom series (2025)

In Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic musings with Nathaniel Mackey in c o n V E R S a t i o n s, a public discussion between the two at Poet’s House in New York City in 1993,  he conceptualizes Caribbean psychology as tidalectic, rather than the Western dialectical orientation that is assumed. “Coming from one continent/continuum, touching another, and then receding (reading) from the island (s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future.”[2] The push and pull between disjointed locations of origin and islands first encountered through the exceeding violence of Trans-Atlantic slavery. History for those from the Caribbean who live in the vertigo of colonial displacement amidst plantation social architecture which perpetuates in shifting forms, is a recording of uncertainty of where the ‘I” begins.[3] What is the relationship of I and I to the lineage of being that came before this making of my subjectivity plagued by  subjugation?[4]

This body of work, and Simon Benjamin’s broader practice, attends to the foundational textured histories of the Caribbean, recognizing the multiplicity, contradictions and difficult realities. He both affirms Stuart Hall’s incisive understanding that colonialism continues in different iterations while remaining curious to the myriad modes of meaning making and living that unfold.[5]

Notes

[1] Agard-Jones, Vanessa. "What the sands remember." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 2-3 (2012): 325-346.

[2]  Brathwaite, Kamau and Mackey, Nathaniel. Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey. We Press, 1999. 

[3] Thomas, Valorie D. "1+ 1= 3" and Other Dilemmas: Reading Vertigo in" Invisible Man"," My Life in the Bush of Ghosts", and" Song of Solomon." African American Review 37, no. 1 (2003): 81-94.

[4] The phrase “I and I” is used within the Rastafarianism religious and cultural movement both as a linguistic and philosophical conception that underscores each person’s intimate connection to God (Jah), the presence of Jah within you, and therefore a connection to every other person as well. The phrase often replaces “our”, “you”, “us” and “we” to emphasize this belief in  unity. 

[5]  Hall, Stuart. “Though time has been called on colonialism’s earlier forms, you have only to read a daily newspaper or turn on the TV news to appreciate that the so-called colonial world is still unfolding – more accurately, unravelling – inside the post-colonial, in the wake, in the devastating aftermath, of an untranscended colonialism: a disaster-littered, protracted, bloody and unfinished terrain which, in its globally transformed state, still occupies our world.” Familiar stranger: A life between two islands. Duke University Press, 2017..