Encyclopedia of Invisibility (Pocket Guide)
Tavares Strachan
The Encyclopedia of Invisibility (Pocket Guide) is a vast compendium comprising thousands of entries dedicated to historically marginalized individuals, places, and events. It is both a body of research into overlooked and hidden histories and a work that operates simultaneously as literature and as sculpture. The project stemmed from an idea; a question of finding a place “where to put all the things that were misplaced” in the writing of history.
Over the course of fifteen years, Strachan together with a team of researchers, delved into an extraordinary range of sources ranging from interviews, rare book libraries and archives, to countless phone calls and emails. Together they compiled their very own Encyclopedia, whose intertextual reference to the Encyclopaedia Britannica is explicit. It deliberately positions the work as a powerful j’accuse against institutional forms of knowledge which, grounded in their self-referential authority, have long imposed themselves as absolute truths.
You’re invited to leaf through the Encyclopedia of Invisibility, provided you put on the white gloves.
2024 – leather, gilding, archival paper, lucite box and stand, 23,5 x 30.8 x 25.4cm (overall), edition of 250 (#59/250) (28349).Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.
Tavares Strachan
°1979, Nassau, Bahamas
Tavares Strachan is a contemporary conceptual artist whose practice activates the intersections of art, science, and politics, offering uniquely synthesized points of view on the cultural dynamics of scientific knowledge. Aeronautics, astronomy, deep-sea exploration, and extreme climatology are but some of the thematic arenas out of which Strachan creates monumental allegories that tell of cultural displacement, human aspiration, and mortal limitation. Themes of invisibility, displacement, and loss are central to his work, which questions historically canonized narratives that marginalize or obscure others. Strachan’s work has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions at a.o. Prospect 3. Biennial, New Orleans; Biennale de Lyon, Lyon; The Bahamas National Pavilion 55th Venice Biennale, Venice; Undisclosed Exhibition, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; Hayward Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Mannheim; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including most recently the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship (2022), 2019-20 Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, 2018 Frontier Art Prize, and the Allen Institute’s inaugural artist-in-residence in 2018. Strachan received a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2003 and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. He draws on both the resources and community of his birthplace, dividing his time between his studio in New York and Nassau, where he has established an 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. He is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery.
Photo: Tavares Strachan © Kevin Claiborne
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