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PHI Event Centre Collectiondeouvres Tavares Strachan

Tavares Strachan

Black Madonna (Louise Little and Malcolm X) - 2002

Bronze, gold leaf
59 x 58 x 21 cm
Collection of Phoebe Greenberg

About the artist

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 the 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.

Figure–Ground

Tavares Strachan's Black Madonna (Louise Little and Malcolm X) is currently on view in Figure–Ground, a series bringing together several works from PHI's art collection that explore the figure and the complex and intimate correlation it establishes with its background.

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PHI's art collection

December 15 June 11, 2023

An ongoing collection of contemporary artworks, accessible and free at the PHI Centre

Installation Contemporary Art