Tanner Simon’s practice explores familiar visual tropes through the use of heroic scale and parodies of power. While not overtly political, Simon's work seeks to re-contextualize cultural truisms and common knowledge into icons of significance. His work is inspired by imagery created using digital paint and 3-D modeling software, often utilizing intensely flat fields of color and smooth renderings that evoke early internet meme culture. His use of strategic formal decisions and playfully vibrant colors fixes otherwise mutable subjects and imbues them with a bombastic presence. Simon's paintings assert their physicality through their scale and placement within space, forging a dynamic relationship with the viewer and questioning preconceived notions of their relationship with issues of representation, power, and meaning.
Born in 1998, Tanner Simon is a multidisciplinary artist from Honesdale, PA. He holds an MFA from the University of South Florida and a BA in US History and Studio Art from Elizabethtown College. Simon is currently the Gallery and Grants Manager at the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance in Narrowsburg, NY.