“Recently I made this encyclopedia, the Encyclopedia of Invisibility, and the inspiration was sparked by Matthew Henson and his story. What became apparent to me was that there is this whole world of invisibility that was in plain sight”
Credits: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington D.C.
On the occasion of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, Tavares Strachan represented the Bahamas in its first ever pavilion. For this pioneering exhibition, the artist chose to capture the figure of Matthew Henson, an African American Arctic explorer, who was possibly the first person to reach the North Pole. Throughout the years, Strachan returned to the subject as part of his Constellation Experiment series, of which the present work is exemplary. In these works, the artist explores the idea of the invisible, an ongoing theme in his practice. Executed in 2012, Mathew Henson doubles as a portrait of the likeness of Henson and a portrait of the man himself; Strachan collages images from the explorer’s life such as arctic dogs, dog sleds, his house, and his family, in order to build this exceptional portrait.
“When I talk about ‘exploration’ I am talking about adaptability. What I’m trying to do, essentially, is to triangulate the so- called new world, the old world and the uninhabitable poles, while talking to the potential catastrophe or grace that might face all three.”
Strachan returned to the subject in his multidisciplinary practice throughout the years, from The Distance between What We Have and What We Want (2006), in which he shipped a block of Arctic ice to Nassau, to the Encyclopedia of Invisibility (2013). He explains his ongoing fascination with Henson’s story: “The reason why it is such rich material is because it doesn’t stop opening itself up. What’s exciting about it for me is that it becomes metaphor - it goes from being matter of fact into a piece of poetry - and that’s why I keep going back into it” (Tavares Strachan in interview with Louisa Buck, ‘Tavares Strachan: 'I grew up not feeling empowered by art'’, The Art Newspaper, 8 September 2020, online).
Like Henson, Strachan himself is an avid explorer; he is the first Bahamian to have visited the North Pole as well as being the country’s first trained astronaut. He is known for consistently incorporating science within his practice, and illuminating the histories of lesser known yet trailblazing black figures like Henson, as well as Robert Lawrence Jr., the African-American Astronaut whose dream of going into space was cut off by his death in a training accident in 1967. As curator Eugenie Joo observes, “Tavares has always taken on science and knowledge and possibility in this almost overly ambitious way...That’s a brave curiosity. There’s no one like him in that way.” (Eugenie Joo cited in Zoë Lescaze, ‘The Artist Whose Medium is Science’, The New York Times, 20 September 2020, online)