Work Hurt (Installation)
mixed-media, dimensions variable, 2018
Shoot-Hole Country (Installation)
vinyl, synthetic polymer pigment, archivable inkjet monoprint, wood, monitor, HD video, light, dimensions variable, 2018
Mean Green Love Machine
synthetic polymer pigment, latex paint, archivable inkjet monoprint, canvas, thread, yearn, embroidery, 9 x 9 feet, 2018
Autocombustophobia
synthetic polymer pigment, paper, plastic, wood, archivable inkjet monoprint mounted to paper on polypropelene, 22 x 7 feet, 2017
Think of You
latex, acrylic, paper, thread, plastic eyeballs on poly wrapped canvas, 16 x 20 x 4 inches, 2017
Families Reunion
synthetic polymer pigment, archivable inkjet monoprint, picture frames, pie pans on paper mounted to polypropelene, 18 x 6 feet, 2016
Family Portrait
synthetic polymer pigment, latex, acrylic, archivable inkjet monoprint, felt, paper skeleton, hand-stitching, thread, 18 x 6 feet, 2016
The Great Escape
latex on canvas, 5 x 5 feet, 2016
No Way Out
acrylic, solid marker, charcoal, paper on acetate, 90 x 51 inches, 2015
Make it Rain
spray paint, solid marker, charcoula, oil on watercolor paper, 120 x 48 inches, 2014
Artist Website
Heat and Weight
It is with the act of play that you are encouraged to look And with sincere, intense passion I aim to seduce the viewer
I take bright and bold colors, use them, ring them out on the canvas in drips and splashes. I repeat forms, images and motif’s with paint and digital processes to heighten the emotion of my work and reiterate the obvious, like a raw deal turned inside joke. It is a punch and knock-out, a drop-dead-beauty that inspire me. I want to lay before you the delicious, the desired… but just to watch you salivate in waves as the reciprocation of energy that is the experience provides repose.
And, just as to care-take the work is to parent an emotion, my work is guardian to viewership.
Both the aesthetic and social means of visual communication are areas of my investigation. I want to make work that appeals to my taste and I want to make art that appeals to a Universal Truth, and sometimes this work will intersect.
Painting inspires and poses questions that with brushes, marks, movement and rhythm I propose complicated imagery to further the inquiry of what painting can be. I think about the Kitchen, the Master Bedroom, Space. What about domesticity that intrigues me are my personal struggles with relationship. I slide to the canvas, I hold my family close, I poke pins in fabric and imagine space through installation held together by the binds of craft.
The Mother, the Child, Family, a father’s complex psycho-sexual anxieties: Contemporary Art never seemed so banal. This is a joke, as if to say that when you see my work it is screaming through your eyelids. I like to poke holes in and tear paper,like I rearrange the studio to create something new, something touching. I want to excite and inspire. My work is alive with color, energy, Heat and Weight. Life itself is dangerous and exciting, and as I’ve spent decades care-taking the subjects of my work, I aim to take care of those inclined to the colorful, the poignant and the utterly rashexpression.
To pull you in is to share the desire to pull away
Tavarus Blackmon is a Sacramento native. He has been published in Susurrus, Calaveras Station, The Sacramento News and Review,The Suisun Valley Review and Newsletter. His thesis, The Politics of the Cartoon and Contemporary Art investigates the development of Outsider Art through the lens of Funk Art and Chicago-based Imagists. Exhibiting locally, nationally and internationally, he is recently the graduate of the MFA program and Provost Fellow at The University of California Davis. He has exhibited at Shy Rabbit Gallery, Pagosa Springs, CO; The Midway, San Francisco, CA; American Steel Studios, Oakland, CA, The Center for Digital Art, Los Angeles, CA, FE Gallery, Sacramento, CA, BrickHouse Gallery, Sacramento, CA and the Blue Banana Video Art Festival in Berlin, Germany. He has made a warm, artful, home with his partner Elizabeth and their three children.