Cool Hunting

Like historical land artists Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark before him, Tavares Strachan's "Where We Are Is Always Miles Away" uses the physical environment as a medium. Opening this Friday, 17 November 2006 at San Francisco's Luggage Store gallery, the show features a 56" x 56" piece of sidewalk from Crown Street in New Haven, Connecticut that was removed by a crew from the city leaving no trace that anything out of the ordinary had taken place. Including cement, earth, a parking meter, a street sign, as well as the accompanying air that was collected, the excavated materials were trucked to the gallery where they will be exhibited in a hermetically sealed container that is made to recreate the atmospheric and temperature conditions at the time of Strachan's excavation. The gallery will be lit to with the same level of light from the time of day that the piece was taken from the streets of New Haven, Connecticut.

Where his predecessors Smithson and Matta-Clark mostly worked within the natural environment, Strachnan—whose past work includes the relocation of a block of Alaskan ice to his native Bahamas— utilizes current scientific technologies to explore multiple layers of removal, replacement, repositioning and re-creation while evoking both absence and presence (or non-presence).

Opens Friday, 17 November 2006, 6-8pm
Through 6 January 2007
Luggage Store Gallery
1007 Market Street
San Francisco, CA 94103 map
tel. 01 415 255 5971