Tavares Strachan
Tavares Strachan’s conceptual, interdisciplinary practice activates connections between art, science, history, and cultural critique to mobilize our senses, intellect and curiosity, asking us to consider our own relationship to what is seen and what is unseen. Themes of invisibility, displacement and loss are elemental to Strachan’s investigations, which question ensconced systems and truisms by reframing canonized bodies of histories, and unsettling the conditions by which some are legitimized and others obscured.
He uses the rubric of received knowledge to make networks and structures of power more visible and 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 embodies the migratory, cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, and open-ended nature of contemporary artmaking. 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. He draws on both the resources and community of his birthplace, dividing his time between New York and Nassau in the Bahamas, where he has established an art studio and scientific research platform B.A.S.E.C. (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center) and OKU, a not-for-profit community project encompassing …
Tavares Strachan’s conceptual, interdisciplinary practice activates connections between art, science, history, and cultural critique to mobilize our senses, intellect and curiosity, asking us to consider our own relationship to what is seen and what is unseen. Themes of invisibility, displacement and loss are elemental to Strachan’s investigations, which question ensconced systems and truisms by reframing canonized bodies of histories, and unsettling the conditions by which some are legitimized and others obscured.
He uses the rubric of received knowledge to make networks and structures of power more visible and 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 embodies the migratory, cross-cultural, multidisciplinary, and open-ended nature of contemporary artmaking. 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. He draws on both the resources and community of his birthplace, dividing his time between New York and Nassau in the Bahamas, where he has established an art studio and scientific research platform B.A.S.E.C. (Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center) and OKU, a not-for-profit community project encompassing an artist residency and exhibition spaces, a scholarship scheme, and after-school creative programs.
Tavares has exhibited at The Bass, the Carnegie Museum of Art, LACMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Musée d’art contemporain, the Dvir Gallery, The Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, and the RISD Museum to name a few.
