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POMERANZ COLLECTION

TAVARES STRACHAN

Mathew Henson
2012
Light box
152.4 x101.6 x 5.1 cm
Unique
Inv. Nr. 185

Born in 1979
Lives and works between New-York and Nassau, Bahamas

Tavares Strachan who graduates from Yale University (MFA), is a contemporary, conceptual artist whose multi-media installations investigate science, technology, mythology, history, and exploration, considered as one of the most interesting personalities of the last years contemporary art scene.
Mathew Henson, 2012 is a fragmented portrait of the life of explorer. Matthew Henson was the first to discover the North Pole in 1909 with Robert Peary but was discredited for his contributions. In this piece there are no actual images of Matthew Henson used. Only images from aspects of his life for example his family, dog sleds, arctic tools for hunting, his house and a number of his personal experiences during his time in the arctic. The artist printed images than out cut them and build a portrait of this unknown explorer.
This work, which is part the Constellation Experiment series, is dealing with the idea of invisible. The numbers are used to catalog each object in the collage. The same way an analyst would analyze a crime scene, the numbers are attempting to find order. The numbers also now represent a kind of aesthetic chaos and an explosion of scientific data.
In Strachan’s work, a constant swinging between the visible and the invisible demands the viewer to question their being-in-the world. It invites us to re-examine the ways in which we perceive and engage with the material manifestations of everyday life, bringing to the forefront questions concerning reality and illusion, truth and fiction, “somethingness” and “nothingness”.