A weekly Guide column in which we dissect the influences and interpretations of a work of art
The odd bunch …
What connects the silk-screened figures that inhabit Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan’s new painting Every Knee Shall Bow: Queen Elizabeth, an Indigenous Canadian hunter, the blind reggae star Frankie Paul and the former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie?
Pieces of the puzzle …
Teasingly, an empty crossword puzzle occupies the top corner of the painting. Like cryptic clues, his constellation of culturally disparate figures is a prompt to reimagine how things might fit together.
Bow wow …
The title is biblical: the dictate to bow before God. Within the Rastafarian movement, Haile Selassie is considered the second coming of Christ and Queen Elizabeth reportedly made a once-in-a-lifetime bow to the emperor, who outranked her.
Going for gold …
Selassie had been mocked for his coronation’s pomp by condescending European writers, but here it is HRH who is pictured in all-out bling, on her coronation day.
The invisibles …
Much of the content of Strachan’s work originates in the Encyclopedia of Invisibility that he began in 2018: a compendium of marginalised figures prompted by his interest in Matthew Henson, the black American explorer and the first man to reach the north pole in 1909.
Now you see me …
Strachan invites us to consider what gets preference and why within power structures. Frankie Paul was one of the artist’s boyhood obsessions, verboten in his school, which taught a western cultural canon. Strachan also points out the holes in Henson and his fellow explorers’ narrative. Indigenous people had been exploring the Arctic long before them, and the fur-clad figure is a reminder that there’s always someone whose experiences are overwritten by the people telling the story.
Tavares Strachan, Marian Goodman Gallery, W1, to 24 October
