Tavares Strachan’s Energetic Interrogations
Tavares Strachan. Encyclopedia of Invisibility (Pocket Guide), 2024. Leather, gilding, archival paper, lucite box, and stand. 9 1/4 x 12 1/8 x 10 in. (23.5 x 30.8 x 25.4 cm) (overall) . Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo credit: Elon Schoenholz.
Upon ascending the small flight of steps in Marian Goodman’s pristine entryway, I am faced with a pitch-black box. On the right, half a piano eerily plays its own discordant tune; on the left, a leatherbound emerald copy of Tavares Strachan’s Encyclopedia of Invisibility is framed in a clear plastic cradle. I hear the echoing sound of a percussion instrument, and faintly smell something earthy and warm. This is the opening act of Strachan’s solo show Starless Midnight, now on view at Marian Goodman Gallery through April 19. Journeying through its installations, I feel rather like a rat in a maze, coaxed through a series of strange puzzles for which there are no instructions. It’s not an entirely alienating feeling—rather, the encompassing insular spaces of Starless Midnight are a welcome challenge that meets me right at the edge of my intellectual comfort zone.
Tavares Strachan, The Birth of Exuma (Eagle Talon), 2024. Ceramic, rice field installation. Ceramic: 72 7/8 x 26 ¾ x 15 in. (185 x 68 x 38 cm); Rice field: 533 ½ x 189 in. (1355.1 x 480.1 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging.
The Encyclopedia is a well-placed thesis statement for the rooms that lie behind it: Strachan’s oeuvre is largely governed by principles of inquisitive authorship, and the Encyclopedia encapsulates, both theoretically and physically, the boldly erudite tone with which many of his works make their investigations. Leaving the black box space, the earthy smell guides me to the North Gallery, where reddish packed dirt replaces the smooth gallery floors surrounding a meadow of rice grass shaped as a Ghanaian symbol for Okodee MMowere, connoting bravery. In its center is a large ceramic sculpture of the artist Exuma, facing the street windows calmly and haloed by an LED-installed James Baldwin quote on the walls that begins with “You could be that person…” The eerie self-playing piano turns out to be installed through a dividing wall, the rest of it standing bluntly on the packed earth of this well-lit room. Once I venture across the meadow into the small annex room to see the elaborate natural hair arrangement on the pure marble of A Map of the Crown, the legibility of Strachan’s experiment is unmistakable. Juxtaposing natural and high-tech materials, legacies of Indigenous and colonial cultures of making, the artist interrogates physical relationships laden with histories of violent encounters, and simultaneously interrogates the marks those encounters have left.
Resonant percussion instruments continue to jar with more strictly visual artworks on the second floor, where Strachan’s multimedia works—from mohair tapestries to ceramic dishes—present a more tight-knit progression of not-quite-solvable puzzles. An array of painted plates on one wall present a diagrammatic iconography of animals and motifs (including an ibex, a perennial visual motif on ceramics and glassware across Mediterranean history) alongside such hyper-constructed images as identifiable Rorschach blots and the hard straight lines of a water-gun in Super Soaker. The ceramic sculpture in the center of the gallery, Shu and Horus (Coleman and Harriet), cements the confrontations of intertwined histories. The work consists of a bust of Harriet Tubman encased within a larger bust of pilot Bessie Coleman. The titular evocation of two ancient Egyptian deities—Horus being a descendant of the primordial god Shu—brings to mind themes of connection and generational resistance within the broader context of history and memory.
Installation view, Tavares Strachan, Starless Midnight, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging.
One room over, a large mohair tapestry is centered on the floor, surrounded by detailed collage paintings—labyrinthine explorations of the materials and the histories that produce them: a Songye mask from the Congo region interposed on a two-dimensional white figure in kilted military uniform in Zeus and Oludumare, photographs of the moon and snowy owls reproduced with Bahamas postage stamps to guarantee travel in Shadow Maps (The Snowy Owl). The dizzying web of histories, both personal and political, brought together here is a serious interrogation with a welcoming textural gesture.
This well-lit space is once more answered with encompassing darkness: an echoing balafon creates an almost Lynchian cinematic encounter with three spot-lit paintings that are less paintings than deliberate confusions. Each canvas (titled Gemini I, II, and III respectively) is covered in colorful English letters arranged in a word-search-like grid, yet there are no discernible words to be found. Two benches are the only other things in the cavernous dark room, the only seating in the entire gallery. The address to viewers that began with Baldwin’s implied injunction to bravery on the first floor culminates here, where the recognizable forms of text are fully abstracted. How long should I spend scrutinizing the letters before accepting I won’t find any words I can read? Is this deeply insulated space a womb or a tomb for the language it eschews? The absurdity and the necessity of conveying this experience through language once more underscores the vitality of Strachan’s project. The word search paintings are activated by the viewer’s time and immersion, asking that we address and then abandon our assumptions for how a narrative should unfold.
Installation view, Tavares Strachan, Starless Midnight, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo credit: Tom Powel Imaging.
Interrogation emerges as the central act that defines Starless Midnight: an investigative challenge that morphs and takes on new language in each iteration, and that maintains its pursuit of some unknown but certainly crucial variable. Each artwork draws taut the tangles of its materials and layered symbolisms, pulling the viewer energetically across smudged boundaries and illusory borders.
Tavares Strachan: Starless Midnight is on view at Marian Goodman Gallery New York from March 7 to April 19, 2025.
