Tavares Strachan

Tavares Strachan’s first comprehensive exhibition of four major works will take place concurrently at the Feldman Gallery in Manhattan and Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn. At the Feldman gallery, the artist will exhibit two sculptural works from 2006.

Components for Absolute Symbiosis

For this work, Strachan has reconstructed the major artery system of the human body in hollow blown glass. Determining that at a specific viscosity of mineral oil the glass would become nearly invisible, the artist built a thick Plexiglas container, weighing one and a half tons, to hold three hundred gallons of the mineral oil in which the glass artery system was immersed.

In addition to its conventional properties, the oil is transformed by what the artist describes as an alchemical adjustment.”

Glo–Our Rain Maker

Within a glass sphere, Strachan recreates the natural phenomenon of cloud formation, fabricating an environment from a computer system, electronics and pressure, and the addition of water and silicon powder. The silicon powder is released at varying intervals into the cloud chamber to create a cloud that exists for approximately ten to fifteen minutes. The cycle is then repeated.

The exhibition also includes light box photographs of the cloud formations at various stages. Since the water and silica dust are from New York City, the photographs represent New York City cloud formations.

Strachan’s work, related to the displacement of physical space and its impact upon perception, touches on many issues – environmental, geographic, cultural, and historical. Themes of presence and distance, and the importance of preservation, relate to the artist’s life experience of cross-cultural clash.

Tavares Strachan was born in the Bahamas. He holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from Yale University. His sculptural work, The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want (Artic Ice Project), a four and a half ton block of ice from the Artic Circle, encased in a specially designed case powered by solar energy, was exhibited at the Aubrey Sayle Primary School (which the artist attended) in Nassau, Bahamas last summer and will be shown in Miami at the time of Art Basel Miami in December.

Tavares Strachan