Tavares Strachan

Tavares Henderson Strachan (born December 16, 1979) is a contemporary, conceptual artist whose multi-media installations investigate science, technology, mythology, history, and exploration. He lives and works in New York City and Nassau, Bahamas.

Early life and education

Strachan was born in Nassau, the capital city of the Bahamas, in 1979, six years after the country gained independence from British rule. Strachan was introduced to the arts as a child through his family’s involvement in Junkanoo, a historical annual parade and cultural celebration incorporating live music, dance, and elaborate costumes hand-made by competing groups. These early experiences provided the foundation for Strachan’s understanding of materials, process, collaboration, and community.

Initially a painter, Strachan earned his Associate of Fine Arts degree from the College of the Bahamas in 1999. In 2000, he moved to the US to enroll in the glass department at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he began to pursue more conceptual projects that would foreground the prevalent themes and minimalist aesthetic of his later work. After completing his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003, Strachan went on to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. Eager to discover the world beyond the Caribbean and ever aware of his tenuous circumstances as a foreign scholarship-based student, Strachan learned to question the boundaries of what was possible and impossible in matters of life and art. This dichotomy continues to be central to his practice.

Career

From the outset, Tavares has questioned what is, as a means of discovering the possibilities of what can be. An artist who entered the international art world on his own terms, he creates works that are ambitious in scale and scope and incorporates science, art, the environment, and human relationships. He’s always thinking about how to build or connect communities with and within his work creating networks that surprise us into reconsidering our relationships on a local and global level. He’s had one-person exhibitions throughout the world in New York City, San Francisco, Tel Aviv, and London among others. In 2013, he represented the Bahamas at the 55th International Venice Biennale. Whether shooting glass rockets fueled by Bahamian sugar cane or harvesting a 4.5-ton block of ice from the arctic and FedEx-ing it to his childhood elementary school in Nassau, Bahamas, Strachan’s work embodies an uncanny understanding of material, process, and human relationships that serves as a foundation for everything he does.

Strachan is best known for his 2006 project, The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want, for which he embarked on a journey to the Alaskan Arctic to excavate a 4.5-ton block of ice which was then transported via FedEx to his native Bahamas and displayed in a solar-powered freezer in the courtyard of his childhood elementary school. The piece is both physically arresting and metaphorically resonant, referencing the fragility of Earth’s homeostatic systems, the strange poetry of cultural and physical displacement, as well as the little-known contributions of Matthew Henson—an under-recognized American explorer and the co-discoverer of the North Pole.

In 2004, Strachan initiated an ambitious four-year multimedia body of work entitled Orthostatic Tolerance—the title referring to the physiological stress that cosmonauts endure while exiting and re-entering Earth from outer space. Exhibited in phases between 2008 and 2011, the Orthostatic Tolerance project incorporated photography, video, drawing, sculpture and installation documenting Strachan’s experience in cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center in Star City, Russia and in experiments in space travel conducted in Nassau under the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center (BASEC)—the artist’s version of NASA for his native country.

In 2011, Strachan exhibited Seen/Unseen—a survey exhibition of past and present works—at an undisclosed location in New York City that was deliberately closed to the general public. Exploring themes of presence and absence, the exhibition focused on the artist’s overall practice of positioning works in such a way that some of their aspects are visible while others remain conceptual, asserting the exhibition as a work of art in its own right. Both ambitious in scope and disruptive to expectations, Seen/Unseen manifested a type of meditative experience, presenting over 50 works from drawings, photographs, video works, sculpture, and installations in a massive 20,000-square-foot industrial space converted specifically for the exhibition. While access to "Seen/Unseen" was restricted to the organizers, the exhibition itself was fully documented with a website and an illustrated catalogue designed by Stefan Sagmeister.

A recent large scale installation of his work was showcased as part of Desert X exhibition in the Coachella Valley from February 25 - April 30, 2017.

Awards

• 2006 Alice B. Kimball Fellowship
• 2007 Grand Arts Residency Fellowship
• 2008 Tiffany Foundation Grant
• 2009-2010 MIT Artist-in-Residence
• 2013 Representing The Bahamas at the 55th Venice Biennale
• 2014 LACMA Art & Technology Artist Grant Recipient
• 2018 Frontiers Art Prize

External links

• Tavares Strachan's Notions of Absence and Presence, Visibility and Invisibility at Rossi & Rossi
• “Artist Installs Neon Sculpture at Cary Academy.”
• Bahamas National Pavilion 55th Venice Biennale