PATRON is proud to present Long, Shore, Drift, our first solo exhibition with New York–based artist Simon Benjamin.

Through a multidisciplinary practice spanning painting, sculpture, installation, printmaking, and video, Benjamin posits the sea and coastal zones as sites of a perennially entangled network of geology and culture. For Benjamin, who is originally from Jamaica, the ecology of the Caribbean becomes a site at which to examine the historical and current relationships between afro-diasporic people and the sea. Emergent from his work to capture his own experiences as an avid surfer and swimmer, Benjamin’s recent work incorporates the physical materials of coastal zones, alongside and in juxtaposition to the visual lexicon of stylized ephemera of tourism produced by an ongoing colonial, commercial economy. Long, Shore, Drift refers to the geological term longshore drift, a natural process that moves sediment along a coastline resulting from the waves’ repetitive actions. Within the context of the exhibition, the pattern becomes a metaphor for examining how coastlines evolve, a concept Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite’s refers to as tidalectics—a framework that conceives of Caribbean identity as cyclical and fluid, shaped not by fixed geography but by movement and exchange. Continually unfolding and falling back upon itself, Long, Shore, Drift offers a repetitive, rhythmic reminder of the series of extractions that continue to shape the world and our perception of it.