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,[1] 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 the artist’s practice.

Career

Strachan caught the attention of the international art scene in 2006 when he embarked on a journey to the Alaskan Arctic to excavate a 4.5 ton block of ice,[2] which he then transported via FedEx to his native Bahamas and displayed in a solar-powered freezer in the courtyard of his childhood elementary school. Titled “The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want,”[3] 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 African-American explorer, Matthew Hensen, who was first researched and written about by Lisa Bloom in Gender on Ice.[4] Produced with support from Manhattan’s Ronald Feldman Gallery[5] and Brooklyn-based gallery Pierogi 2000,[2] the ice work was also exhibited at Miami Basel and the Brooklyn Museum.[3]

Expanding on the themes of exploration, displacement, possibility vs impossibility, and the idea of pushing the body’s physical extremes, Strachan initiated an ambitious four-year, multi-media body of work entitled “Orthostatic Tolerance,” a phrase that refers 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 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 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 recognition of the theme of absence and presence in many of his works, the artist most recently exhibited “Seen/Unseen,” an overview of past and new work at an undisclosed location in New York City . Focusing on the artist's overall practice of positioning individual works so that some of their aspects are visible while others remain conceptual, this exhibition is intended to be a work of art in its own right. While access to "Seen/Unseen" was restricted to the organizers, the exhibition will be documented with a website and a fully illustrated catalogue/book.

Strachan represented The Bahamas in the country’s first national pavilion at the 55th International Venice Biennale in 2013.[6]

Awards

References

  1. ↑ "Conrad Shawcross and Tavares Strachan' Embrace the Spirit of Exploration at the RISD Museum". Gulf Daily Magazine. 11 July 2011. Retrieved 18 November 2012.
  2. 1 2 Russo, Peter J. (10 March 2009). "Tavares Strachan at The Boiler". ArtCat Zine. Retrieved 18 November 2012.
  3. 1 2 Josephson, Marika. "Tavares Strachan @ Brooklyn Museum". White Hot Magazine. Retrieved 18 November 2012.
  4. ↑ Bloom, Lisa (1993). Gender on Ice. University of Minnesota Press.
  5. ↑ "The cloud chamber of Tavares Strachan" (PDF). Chic City Rats. Retrieved 18 November 2012.
  6. ↑ Russeth, Andrew. "Tavares Strachan Will Rep Bahamas at Venice Biennale". Observer.com. Retrieved 25 March 2013.

External links


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