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Tavares Strachan

Blast Off, 2009

Description

Maker

  • Tavares Strachan, b. 1979, Bahamian, (RISD BFA 2003, Glass)

Title

Blast Off

Year

2009

Medium

Shattered glass rocket, color photographs, light box

Place

Western

Type

  • Sculpture

Credit

Mary B. Jackson Fund

Object Number

2010.59

Projects & Publications

Publications

Manual / Issue 11

Repair
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Exhibition History

Exhibition History

Journeys

July 8 - October 23, 2011

Tavares Strachan's Blast Off consists of a shattered glass rocket and photographs of its experimental launch and brief flight off the coast of the artist’s hometown, Nassau, Bahamas. After the launch and crash of the rocket, Strachan searched for the broken shards and reassembled them for a display that recalls the presentation of skeletons in natural history and archeological museums. The rocket, handmade from melted, local beach sand and powered by sugarcane, exemplifies the artist’s ongoing quest to explore infinite space while maintaining a connection with the natural materials of his home.

Blast Off is part of Strachan’s multi-phase project Orthostatic Tolerance, begun in 2006. The term “orthostatic tolerance” describes the ability to withstand pressure while standing upright, specifically in response to the physiological stresses experienced by cosmonauts and deep-sea divers when they leave and return to the surface of the earth. This phenomenon has guided the artist’s exploration of space and sea, which has included intensive training at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia, and an extended residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At MIT he collaborated with the Manned Vehicle Laboratory in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics on a gravity-augmenting centrifuge and with the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Laboratory in the Sea Grant College Program to develop an underwater rover fashioned entirely from clear glass. In addition to projects involving astronaut training and deep-sea diving, which have taken him from the Arctic to the tropics, Strachan hopes to one day establish the Bahamas Aerospace and Sea Exploration Center (BASEC).

Use

The images on this website can enable discovery and collaboration and support new scholarship, and we encourage their use. This object is in Copyright. This object is Blast Off with the accession number of 2010.59. To request high-resolution files or new photography, please send an email to imagerequest@risd.edu and include your name and the object's accession number.

Feedback

We view our online collection as a living documents, and our records are frequently revised and enhanced. If you have additional information or have spotted an error, please send feedback to curatorial@risd.edu.

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