TAVARES STRACHAN

I am explored the relationship between human beings and their environment. Borrowing from Vedic philosophy, the phrase “I am” denotes an identification with the universe, or with some ultimate reality. There is a rich history of human beings exploring the desert as a place to disconnect and reconnect with questions about who they might be. “As someone born on an island, surrounded by what may be considered a beautiful but potentially hostile ocean, I have understood these vast landscapes as opportunities to recenter and dislocate one’s imagination all at the same time,” Tavares Strachan has said. With the help of a skilled team, he dug 290 craters over one hundred thousand square feet—the size of two American football fields—and lined each of them with brightly lit neon tubes. The viewer interacted with what seemed like an abstract, glowing crevasse of light. When viewed from the sky, it read as an exploded phrase, “I am.”

neville wakefield: You’ve been drawn to extreme places: the North Pole, space, and now the desert. In a way, all of them are deserted places, marked by the absence rather than the presence of humanity. What’s your attraction to these barren landscapes?

tavares strachan: The reality is, there’s something that is terrifying about the human condition, especially at this particular moment in time. A huge part of it, specifically for me, is to try and escape some of that. It might come off as a little bit of cowardice, but some of it is self-preservation.

Escape from the human condition or from humans, or both?

Escape from humans. What I mean by that, more specifically, is dogma. Current society, to me at least, is driven by a bipolar nature, especially when you spend a lot of time in America. You get that sense of one side versus the other. That’s a part of society that is really troubling.

You grew up in the Bahamas, surrounded by the sea, which is also a kind of desert. Did that influence your perception of the Coachella Valley landscape?

A lot of what I was experiencing at that juncture had to do with a sense of isolation. It’s easy to feel that sense of isolation when you grow up on an island. That isolation is physical, and it’s also conceptual and psychological.

You created something like a meteorite landing in the desert, like a debris field that covered this vast amount of terrain. Each piece fractured out into its own island. Were you conscious of creating archipelagos in this dark and potentially hostile space?

It wasn’t something that I was immediately conscious of. It was difficult to understand the scale of the work while working on it and making the drawings for it. Flying over the site for drone photography and video is part of the piece. There’s a mismatch between the expectation of the work and the reality of it. Walking through it at night, for example, it distorts your audio and visual perception of what you’re looking at. You can never really take it all in.

It distorts perceptions of scale as well. At times the piece seemed quite intimate, and with the drone photography, you see it in the context of, say, other archipelagos of light from other cities. It’s intensely vast; the scale completely changes.

There’s a certain avoidance of documentation that has been a condition of my practice. Because the art world lives in the past, I think avoiding documentation is a crucial element in managing this system that is constantly trying to engulf images and put them in an archive.

Is that to say that you didn’t want people to make sense of the piece? Or you wanted a disconnect between these two points of view, the ground-level one and the view from above?

You can never have both experiences simultaneously. You couldn’t sit in the work on the ground level and be in the sky at the same time. In this day and age, everybody has their phones out, and when someone photographs it, what are they really photographing? You’re trying to photograph the experience, which is really difficult to do.

If one looks at the history of Land Artists, it’s been about resisting that decisive moment of photography, trying to grapple with something whose scale can’t be reduced to a single image.

Yeah, it is about the individual versus the group. Are we parts of a shared consciousness, and how does the individual fit into that? I think it’s a poetic and moving philosophy.

How did you choose to explode the phrase, to fracture it into almost three hundred different parts? Was that also about legibility?

Yeah, it really was about legibility. I love misunderstanding as a concept, because learning happens

through misunderstanding. So when I talk about the avoidance of historicizing the work through photography, I also think that misunderstanding what you might be looking at, where you might be, and why it’s happening is super critical, because now more than ever, there’s a need for more attention to the things that we don’t understand more than to the things that we do.

Part of that is about denying the viewer a singular position within this cosmology. There was no entry or exit point. There was no right way to address the sculpture.

We’re living in an era where people want everybody else to make meaning for them. That’s where we are at right now: you go to absorb any bit of content, and there’s the other person explaining it away.

Like all great artworks, it’s a question, not a statement or an answer. I’m wondering whether that’s true of the experience.

Yeah, I think it is the simplicity of the phrase itself that allows it to be read as so complex. That this is the misunderstanding is, I think, beautiful, as in a lot of spiritual practice, where it functions at a profound level. That kind of misunderstanding and complexity has been a part of the human experience for quite some time.