Tavares Strachan/Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home

Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home, is the next phase of a new project by Bahamian-born, New York-based artist Tavares Strachan. Since 2006, Strachan has been working on a 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 comes after two years of intensive research and hands-on training that has taken the artist to the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center in Star City, Russia as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This 88 page catalogue publication documents a diverse range of Strachan’s previous and most recent works including a number of new works that were developed during Strachan’s 2009-2010 residency at MIT.