where we are is always miles away.

...on tavares strachan's solo show at the luggage gallery in winter of 2006.


In problematizing a space, its function, its history and value, Tavares Strachan extracts information from a place and carefully transplants it into another existence. Strachan, a Bahamian artist, has completed two projects, so far, that accentuate multiple dialogues attached to a designated space or site. His Arctic Ice Project, The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want, involved displacing an enormous block of ice from the Arctic and shipping it to the Bahamas, where it was preserved in a pristine glass freezer with energy supplied by the Caribbean sun. His most recent displacement, entitled Where We Are is Always Miles Away, involves the replacement of a neglected chunk of Connecticut sidewalk and its static placement on the second-floor of the Luggage Store Gallery in San Francisco.
With the completion of these works, Tavares has ultimately deciphered a way to simultaneously create a void, fill a void, revive the banal art object, and entirely compose a performance of history. In elevating the mundane, Strachan has drawn attention to a site that will remain forever frozen in a mythic space. A space where there is the illusion of communication and a spotlight on alienation. In regards to the piece of sidewalk that he convinced the city of New Haven to replace with a functional replica of the same, the work completely exposes the transformation of value in regards to object. Strachan presents the preserved historic site as an art object, which in the context of the gallery has a significantly different value than the new and functional version of sidewalk that the city installed after the excavation. The old, now historic, non-functioning sidewalk has no use value to those who encountered it in New Haven, Connecticut, and evidently, that community will most likely never have the opportunity or even interest to view it as the monumental art object it has presently become.
Ultimately, this piece directly questions the function of a place, how we locate ourselves within a space, and how a site is defined by the image that its inhabitants have of it.