MIT LIST Visual Arts Center
May 7 to July 11, 2010
The MIT List Visual Arts Center is pleased to present Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home, the next phase of a new project by Bahamian-born, New York-based artist Tavares Strachan. Since 2006, Strachan has been working on this multiphase body of work that explores space and deep-sea training. “Orthostatic” means to stand upright, and “tolerance” refers to the ability to withstand pressure. Combined, the phrase refers to the physiological stress that cosmonauts and deep-sea explorers endure while exiting, and re-entering our home, the thin surface of planet Earth.
The Orthostatic Tolerance mirrors Strachan’s interest in establishing an Ocean and Aerospace Exploration Agency in Nassau (BASEC) both to continue his own exploration efforts while fostering educational outreach efforts for children in his home country. Strachan is perhaps best known for the work, The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want, 2004-06. For this project, Strachan embarked on an Arctic exploration during which he extracted a 4.5-ton block of ice and shipped it to his former grade school in Nassau, where it was kept frozen by a solar-powered freezer. For a year after the Arctic remnant was installed in the sub-tropical environment, Strachan presented lectures in elementary schools throughout the Bahamas. (MIT press release excerpt)
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