TAVARES STRACHAN

The practice of Tavares Strachan often involves a wide range of fields, from science, history and geography to aeronautics, marine biology and engineering. As an artist, he refers to and inhabits the authority associated with these fields in order to explore and bring to light how knowledge and history are written, and by whom. This nod to fields of expertise is at the heart of We Belong Here. Strachan’s text-based sculptural installation combines the visual aesthetics of storefront signage with the linguistic pleasantries of marketing and advertising, in this case initiating important questions for any audience: Who are ‘we’? How does one ‘belong’? And what defines ‘here’? This work occupies a special history in Miami Beach, originally commissioned in 2018 for This Is Not America. The festival explored ways in which place is defined, even as human identities transcend and resist physical, historical and political borders.