Omission Control

Fusing creativity and science, artist Tavares Strachan is reinserting the invisible heroes of history back into the collective memory

- Amah-Rose Abrams

Tavares Strachan grew up in Nassau, in the Bahamas. Not very many artists come from Nassau. That being said, it is a small place, with a population of 393,244 compared with the 8.3 million people living in New York City where Strachan now resides. The remit of Strachan’s work, however, is as big as history and as infinite as time.

Strachan has sent the Black astronaut who never made it into space into orbit, and is in the process of finding invisible people of colour from history and reinserting them into the narrative. He is annotating collective memory and turning the clocks back at will. Creatively inspired by scientific thinking, Strachan has collaborated with both the Allen Institute and SpaceX and has also joined several polar expeditions. A conceptual artist working in neon, painting, collage, and installation, he challenges the norm and turns what is expected from him on its head.

Sitting in his Manhattan studio, in front of a wall of pinned notes and images fluttering in the summer breeze, Strachan muses on what it was like to define himself as an artist growing up on a small island. ‘I had to re-educate myself on what the existential relationship that I was going to have to art was going to be, because the way that I learned about art was these kinds of Western traditions of art-making that are primarily white and male,’ he says.