TAVARES STRACHAN
ARTIST
Tavares Strachan
Tavares Strachan’s socially engaged practice activates interdisciplinary connections between art, science, history, and cultural critique to mobilize our senses, curiosity, and introspection, asking us to consider our own relationship to what is seen and unseen.
Themes of invisibility, displacement and loss are elemental to Strachan’s investigations, which reframe canonized bodies of histories and question the conditions by which some are legitimized and others obscured. He uses the rubric of received knowledge to bring to light forgotten or little-known historical epics and human achievements.
Aeronautical exploration, expeditions to desolate locations and extreme environments, and allegories of the human aspiration to surmount mortal limitations and adverse circumstances, are some of his settings for telling the history of the invisible.
Strachan’s conceptual work is expressed in multiple media including installation, sculpture, painting, collage, drawing, text, performance, and video. He creates immersive and sensorial experiences to envelop the viewer and often designs his work to be integrated into physical environments, buildings, vast landscapes, and even in space.
Extensively researched, his projects are, oftentimes, monumental in scale and scope, and realized in collaboration with specialists and organizations across a wide spectrum of fields. Strachan often engages with children and adults in the process of making artwork and has previously worked with students and communities in The Bahamas and United States on various projects.
Tavares Strachan’s socially engaged practice activates interdisciplinary connections between art, science, history, and cultural critique to mobilize our senses, curiosity, and introspection, asking us to consider our own relationship to what is seen and unseen.
Themes of invisibility, displacement and loss are elemental to Strachan’s investigations, which reframe canonized bodies of histories and question the conditions by which some are legitimized and others obscured. He uses the rubric of received knowledge to bring to light forgotten or little-known historical epics and human achievements.
Aeronautical exploration, expeditions to desolate locations and extreme environments, and allegories of the human aspiration to surmount mortal limitations and adverse circumstances, are some of his settings for telling the history of the invisible.
Strachan’s conceptual work is expressed in multiple media including installation, sculpture, painting, collage, drawing, text, performance, and video. He creates immersive and sensorial experiences to envelop the viewer and often designs his work to be integrated into physical environments, buildings, vast landscapes, and even in space.
Extensively researched, his projects are, oftentimes, monumental in scale and scope, and realized in collaboration with specialists and organizations across a wide spectrum of fields. Strachan often engages with children and adults in the process of making artwork and has previously worked with students and communities in The Bahamas and United States on various projects.
"My work questions the nature of our relationship to the truth. It is really hard to be human without having a relationship to storytelling. Storytelling has been central to every significant movement spanning the history of art. Culture is formed as a result of storytelling, which encompasses all the things we try to hold onto and share with the next generation. So, what happens when historical narratives are false? What do we do with that?"
The Encyclopedia of Invisibility
‘The Encyclopedia of Invisibility’ is a sculptural work that features some 15,000 entries focused on historically marginalized individuals, places, and events. An A-to-Z compendium of research into subject matter and topics of often overlooked and hidden histories, it describes stories of the under-recognized and unknown people, places, events, objects, concepts, and phenomena based on the layout and logic of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. This written and illustrated inverse of the book, traditionally regarded as a primary source of world literacy in the pre-Internet age, functions as Literature while also taking on the role of Sculpture.
"Strachan was excavating marginalized characters from obscurity long before it became an obligation."
The Awakening
Strachan’s first major exhibition in Marian Goodman Gallery’s New York space, ‘The Awakening’s point of departure is the life and work of the pioneering Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). A charismatic leader, Garvey incorporated the Black-owned steamship company The Black Star Line (1919-1922), which aimed to unify and connect people of African descent worldwide, via both the transport of emigrants back to Africa and through the shipment of goods among people of the African Diaspora.
The Black Star Line (a play on the luxury British steamship The White Star Line) was created with the support of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) which Garvey founded in 1914, and embodied tenets of black self-determination and autonomy heralded by the UNIA.
Presented in Spring 2022, ‘The Awakening’ marked part one of a trilogy of exhibitions, which continued with ‘In Total Darkness’ at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris, and ‘In Broad Daylight’ at Perrotin, Paris, which were on view concurrently in Fall 2022.
The trilogy revolves around the notion of invisibility, a key concept in Strachan’s practice, and was designed to unfold over the cycle of a day, from dawn, daylight, and night. Through this triptych of exhibitions, the artist has devised distinct visual chapters, each excavating rarely told stories that highlight overlooked figures throughout history.
In Total Darkness
‘In Total Darkness’ at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris is a journey into time and space, mingling past and contemporary narratives through a series of domestic and spiritual spaces.
Through this immersive and site-specific experience, which incorporates mixed-media and multilayered sculptural works, Strachan summons a large spectrum of historical and cultural references. In Total Darkness engages with French colonialism through an investigation of the Haitian Revolution, the first victorious revolt of Black slaves, and in so doing, Strachan questions our presumed knowledge of history.
“Objects and images in Tavares’s work always beget bigger stories, but their visual uproariousness carries you along.”
In Broad Daylight
‘In broad daylight’ is a phrase that speaks to the brazen-ness of an offense. To commit a criminal act in prime time, when it can be fully seen and witnessed, often confounds and produces an adamant disbelief.
Strachan’s proclivity for playing with double meaning is reflected in the exhibition’s title through his interpretation of the phrase as a revelation of fundamental truths; a nod to an old wives’ tale, ‘sunlight being the best medicine.’ In this exhibition, Strachan explores this duality through a new series of life-size Carrara marble sculptures that depict various Black mothers as they weep the loss of their children, based on the theme of the Madonna and Child.
“One of the things that the history of religious storytelling has done very well is to take beauty and tragedy and smash them together. This is what I am trying to do with this series of sculptures.”
Belong/Brooklyn
Strachan worked with the Joe and Clara Tsai Foundation’s Social Justice Fund to create Belong/Brooklyn (2021), a public art commission on long-term view atop the Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center station complex, serving as a call to unity in the heart of Brooklyn, New York. Those entering the arena will see the first half of the phrase (‘You Belong Here’). Upon leaving the Barclays Center, visitors will see the second half (‘We Belong Here).
The community celebration for the light-up featured free tastings by Brooklyn’s BIPOC-owned restaurants, performances by local talents and groups including Brooklyn United, Brooklynettes, Timeless Torches, Net Kids, and Brooklyn High School of the Arts Choir and a community resource fair featuring local non-profits and support agencies.
“The arts are a powerful tool to inspire lasting social change, and I hope that Tavares’s words of belonging resonate with everyone who passes through the Barclays Center plaza."
“'You belong here' is a starting point. Who decides if we belong? Is it in the power of the individual or the group? I am trying to work this out as a member of this community myself.”
ENOCH
Created in collaboration with Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Art + Technology Lab, Strachan’s ‘ENOCH’ is centered around the development and launch of a 3U satellite that brings to light the forgotten story of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr., the first African American astronaut selected for any national space program.
‘ENOCH’ combines hidden histories, traditions of ancient Egypt, Shinto rituals and beliefs, and the history of exploration. The satellite carrying a 24-karat gold canopic jar featuring a bust of Lawrence was launched via Spaceflight’s SSO-A: SmallSat Express mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. ‘ENOCH’ will continue to circle the Earth for seven years in a sun-synchronous orbit.
For over four years, Strachan and all those involved in ‘ENOCH’ worked in secret to bring the project to life while Strachan and SpaceX publicly collaborated on a children’s program named Chalkboard Drawings. SpaceX engineers discussed scientific concepts of interstellar space with a group of children, ages 7–10, from LACMA’s NexGen program using a dry-erase board to illustrate.
The illustrations generated by the discussion were then interpreted and annotated by Strachan and incorporated into artworks embossed in large slabs of chalk. These works and others will be featured in a future solo exhibition of Strachan’s work at LACMA. Strachan is working on a global project to allow schools around the world to follow ‘ENOCH’s progress.
“Lawrence is someone who has a mostly untold story, who I look at as a hero but who wasn’t necessarily considered one when I was a child in school.”
“How could you go and train as an astronaut? That’s insane! That’s not ambition for anything that has been done before you — that’s just pure curiosity. That’s a brave curiosity. There’s no one like him in that way.”
“Tavares Strachan’s 'ENOCH' exemplifies the LACMA Art + Technology Lab’s mission to foster conversations between talented artists and leading technology companies to realize collaborations that would not be otherwise possible. Launching an artwork into space is a spectacular result of the program. More importantly, Tavares’s project justly honors an under-recognized pioneer of NASA’s space program.”
The Encyclopedia of Invisibility
Strachan created 60 monumental neon installations set onto the facade of the Carnegie Museum of Art’s classical building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania for the 57th Carnegie International. Titled ‘The Encyclopedia of Invisibility,’ the neon works present the names of underrepresented and culturally marginalized historical figures that have been left out of official records and canons, chosen from the artist’s 2,400 page work, ‘Encyclopedia of the Invisible.’
For a performance in collaboration with Kelly Strayhorn Theater created for the illumination of ‘The Encyclopedia of Invisibility,’ participating eight-year-olds were dressed in white uniforms Strachan created with his mother consisting of a bomber jacket featuring patches (each with the name of one ‘Invisible’), collared shirt, tie, and slacks. Each child acted as a museum docent, giving a tour of the project by reciting information about the character he or she embodied.
"Strachan's work explores the limit points between elements of air and liquid, visibility and invisibility, disappearing histories and imminent futures."
Sometimes Lies Are Prettier
‘Sometimes Lies Are Prettier,’ presented at Frieze Art Fair Los Angeles on the Paramount Backlot, points to the contemporary conflation of fact and fiction, where information can be fabricated and beautiful, and factual and unappealing.
"If his paintings explore, his neons provoke."
I Am
‘I Am’ is a neon installation created in a desert outside Palm Springs, CA in collaboration with Desert X. Two hundred and ninety craters, built over a span of two American football fields, were mapped and dug into the sediment in the winter of 2017. Brightly lit neon tubes aligned the perimeters of each crater, which the viewer can see that from a distance, reads the exploded phrase “I am.”
‘I Am’ borrows from a phrase in Vedic texts referring to the state of aligning oneself with ultimate reality, and speaks to the age-old human experience of turning to vast, desolate landscapes as places to re-center and dislocate one’s imagination all at the same time.
You Belong Here
Strachan’s first major public art project, ‘You Belong Here’ (2014), was dedicated to New Orleans in the years of recovery and rebuilding following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. He constructed a 100-foot-long, 22-foot-high neon sculpture illuminating the words ‘You belong here’ for a 140-foot-long barge that traveled from one location to another on the Mississippi River over the course of three months.
Visible throughout New Orleans and its surrounding areas, the artwork offered a message of encouragement to residents of the city and communities in the region, encouraging them reflect on what the city means to them and their futures. The project incorporated a mobile app enabling more people to experience and follow the artwork, also welcoming commentary and opinions.
Polar Eclipse
In his solo exhibition ‘Polar Eclipse’ for the inaugural Bahamas Pavilion at The 55th International Art Exhibition–La Biennale di Venezia (2013), Strachan investigates themes of heroic exploration, cultural displacement, oral history, and the shifting of historic narratives over time, through the historic 1909 expedition of American explorers Robert E. Peary and Matthew A. Henson.
Various written and oral iterations of that journey—whether Henson reached the Pole before the physically incapacitated Peary, whether Henson planted the American flag, and their complex relationship to one another and to Inuit communities—remain fluid and contested, more reflective of shifting ideologies than historic truth.
Strachan’s video and sound installation ’40 Days and 40 Nights’ (2013) touches on the issue of the Venice Biennale’s national pavilion system and not only draws on the fortieth anniversary of independence of The Bahamas, but also on biblical iconography and themes. He arranged for 40 Nassau schoolchildren to learn a song from a rapidly vanishing Inupiaq folk tradition called ayaya—then brought them to Venice to perform it. Among Inuit, ayaya is both a fundamental means of individual expression and a process of intergenerational bonding.
In the ostensibly transnational space of the Venetian Arsenale, the song is both evidence of meaningful exchange between liminal communities, and a signifier of the cultural displacement that makes such exchanges possible. Virtually untranslatable, the song operates outside the much-touted ‘internationalism’ of the global art world.
“He’s an artist without borders, a polymath, a wizard who uses science as part of his palette.”
“I’m fascinated by the idea of being in two or more places at once, and exploring difference that way. The way that the Venice Biennale, historically and now, deploys the idea of 'difference' as cultural tourism is an interesting problem to work with.”
"What became apparent to me was that there is this whole world of invisibility that was in plain sight. The reason why it is such rich material is because it doesn’t stop opening itself up. What’s exciting about it for me is that it becomes metaphor—it goes from being matter of fact into a piece of poetry—and that’s why I keep going back into it."
Seen/Unseen
In recognition of the theme that presence and absence assume in his work, Strachan organized ‘Seen/Unseen’—a large-scale overview of his work from 2003 to 2011—at an undisclosed location in New York from September to October 2011. While the exhibition was not open to the public, it was fully documented with a dedicated website and a publication. Focusing on his overall practice of positioning works so that some of their aspects are visible while others remain conceptual, ‘Seen/Unseen’ is intended to be a work of art in its own right.
Strachan’s exhibition represents the latest contribution to the now legendary tradition of closed exhibitions, including Robert Barry’s now infamous 1969 ‘Closed Gallery Piece’ and Yoko Ono’s 1971 advertisement for her non-existent Museum of Modern Art exhibition. However, unlike those empty or fictitious exhibitions, Strachan’s exhibition was populated with drawings, photographs, video works, sculpture, installations, and a series of works created in collaboration with MIT research scientists, in a massive 20,000-square-foot industrial space, converted just for the exhibition.
Strachan began emphasizing the duality of presence and absence in his art as early as 2003, when he installed a light meter outside his mother’s house on the outskirts of Nassau and connected it via satellite to a computer-activated light box in his Rhode Island School of Design dorm room to create an interactive work, enabling him to enjoy in real time and around the clock simulated Bahamian light and darkness.
The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want
‘The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want’ (2004 – 2006) is recognized as the first of Strachan’s numerous boldly ambitious projects. In 2004, he embarked on an eight-day expedition to the Alaskan Arctic in search of a frozen river. With the help of a skilled team, he excavated 4.5-ton block of ice from a frozen river a few hundred miles below the Arctic Circle and stored it in preparation for its shipment to The Bahamas.
Two years later in July, the peak of summer in The Bahamas, the ice-block was delivered via Federal Express to Strachan’s elementary school in Nassau, where it was kept frozen by a custom-designed freezer powered by solar energy collected through panels placed on the school’s outdoor grounds. The art installation was displayed at Strachan’s elementary school for a year, during which he presented lectures in schools throughout The Bahamas. To Strachan, the act of retracing and re-enacting his Arctic expedition through lectures, the tradition of oral storytelling, and performance, is a way of embedding a distant experience into the collective imagination of a community.
“It is not possible to have an artistic practice without deeply considering exploration. I was born in the Bahamas on a tiny island, so exploration was a way for me to learn more about who I was."
"The students at the school were as stunned by the work as they were delighted — most of them didn’t know that ice formed in nature. It might as well have been a spaceship."
Six Thousand Years
The installation ‘Six Thousand Years’ is one person’s attempt to unravel the Borgesian web, centering Strachan’s monumental work the ‘Encyclopedia of Invisibility.’ Its fifteen thousand entries describe people, places, objects, concepts, artworks, and scientific phenomena that are hard to see and difficult to ascertain.
"Strachan’s passion for unearthing obscure trailblazers complements his own audacious feats of exploration."
B.A.S.E.C.
Strachan set up B.A.S.E.C. (pronounced “basic”), short for The Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center, in his birthplace of Nassau in 2008 after returning from cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center. He envisioned the project as a means of bringing science, technology and experimentation to a community that historically has had limited access to those fields.
The B.A.S.E.C. logo, combining colors and iconography of the islands and of the Bahamian flag, symbolizes a united people and a determination to develop the rich resources of sea and land, synthesizing a broader dialogue on the ties of scientific research and experimentation to natural resources and national identity.
Strachan’s experimentation, developed through contact with scientists at major and nationalized space agencies, remains persistently individual and subjective, while at the same time connected to a localized, expanded field. One of the first missions Strachan developed was a series of glass rockets hand-fashioned from Nassau coastal sand and launched using a trial fuel derived from cane sugar.
Inspired by aerospace innovation programs that exist across the globe, Strachan strives to get The Bahamas involved in the global exploration conversation. Through B.A.S.E.C.’s experiments and a program of visiting scientists, Strachan aims to increase young Bahamians’ access to new ideas and possibilities, and to facilitate the development of new creative traditions that will serve the next generation.
B.A.S.E.C. Apparel
B.A.S.E.C. apparel emerged from conversations between Strachan and his mother, a seamstress, who suggested the best route to draw young people in to exploration would be through clothing. The idea of producing small-batch capsules came from one such discussion about engaging with makers and the positive reverberations such work has on a local level. The process of making can provide enrichment and a livelihood to young people, stimulating self-esteem, building pride, and a sense of place and well-being.
The first B.A.S.E.C. collection featured six bomber jackets designed, patterned and handmade by a group of women in Nassau, overseen by Strachan’s mother. Crafted from natural-fiber fabrics such as cotton, silk organdy and canvas, and embroidered with patches communicating the specific mission goals of B.A.S.E.C. or based on past conducted missions, each bomber came in a hand-assembled B.A.S.E.C. box signed by the artist, along with DIY instructions for science experiments.
Proceeds from the sales of the bombers, which were made in limited editions ranging from 25 to 50, went into the development of teaching programs including sewing and design for women in Nassau, led by Ella Strachan who continues to inspire young women to make it on their own through makers skills and projects.
“Each element of the jacket is highlighting a different narrative about this space agency, what it means to past and what it means to the future. The jackets are all reversible, so the idea is that the person of the future will wear one thing in many ways as opposed to many things in one way.”
PUBLICATIONS
Seen/Unseen
‘Seen/Unseen’ is an artist book and monograph documenting Strachan’s 2011 survey exhibition ‘Seen/Unseen,’ installed in an undisclosed New York City location and deliberately made inaccessible to the general public. Navigating through the polarizing dichotomies of presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, and man and nature, Strachan has engineered a multidisciplinary artistic practice that mobilizes our visual, intellectual, and emotional faculties. Aeronautical and astronomical science, deep-sea exploration, and extreme climatology are but some of the thematic arenas out of which Strachan creates performative allegories that tell of cultural displacement, human aspiration, and mortal limitation.
Edited by Hanae Ko and Elaine W. Ng and designed by Sagmeister&Walsh, Seen/Unseen features new texts by Gregory Volk and Robert Hobbs and interviews between the artist and Franklin Sirmans and schoolchildren of the Cary Academy.
"I think creativity has nothing to do with one’s identity, but more to do with one’s sense of purpose and spirit. When you’re thinking of creative practice in relation to limitation – limitation meaning that there weren’t very many artists who looked like me in the world – it became this opportunity to think about how the creative process is defined by the authorities, and basically ignore all of it. Do everything in spite of it."
Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home
Since 2006, Strachan has been working on a body of work investigating orthostatic tolerance–our capacity to withstand deep-sea and outer-space pressure. Strachan’s films, examined here, show the artist in training for his experiments with gravitational stress. The book also is a record of Strachan’s artists’ residence at MIT.
I Belong Here
In 2005, Strachan created ‘The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want:’ a four-ton block of sub-Arctic ice, shipped to his Nassau elementary school and housed in a solar-powered refrigerator unit. Themes of transformation, presence, and absence, and the human ability to withstand pressure caused by quick changes of altitude, have been recurrent concerns for Strachan. His experience at the Russian Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City and skill as a master diver, have both played a role in his art. This monograph focuses on Strachan’s recent sculpture of white neon tubing, simulating a stop-action photograph of imploding or exploding words to either affirm or refute its statement about identity. Strachan has been selected as the first representative of the Bahamas at the 2013 Venice Biennale.
I Am
Two hundred and ninety craters, built over a span of two America football fields, were dug in Palm Springs, CA in the winter of 2017. The craters in the desert were mapped and dug into the sediment, brightly lit neon tubes aligned the perimeters of each crater, which the viewer can see that from a distance, reads the exploded phrase “I am.” This soft-bound catalog is a representation of the process and implementation of Strachan’s installation in part of “Desert X.”
Includes a custom ziplock bag, and a printed acetate sleeve. Limited Edition sets come with the sealed and signed book, specially designed shovel bookstand, and map coordinates for the works buried in the Palm Springs desert.
TAVARES STRACHAN
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