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.
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, JAY JAY, Sacramento, CA, BrickHouse Gallery, Sacramento, CA, Gearbox Gallery, Oakland, CA, Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, CA and the Blue Banana Video Art Festival in Berlin, Germany. He is currently Graduate Fellow at The Headlands Center for the Arts and member of Axis Gallery in Sacramento, CA

Hot Sacred

Statement:
I take bright and bold colors, use them, ring them out on the canvas in drips and splashes. With energy and sensousness, I repeat forms, images and motif’s. And, with paint and digital processes I 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. What is sexy and emmediate in the work, but also what is tender and evocative, is something I explore. 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. As an African-American I make concessions: I can’t have unconditional freedom but, opportunity, so I bestow both what is wanted in a work, like visual literacy, but also imbibe my practice with social concern, like the identity of the oppressed.

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. 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 rash expression. And, I rearange the studio by making the nuclear family both sexy and strong yet dangerous and cathartic.