Tavares Strachan brought the East Coast—at least a sizeable piece of it—with him on his recent visit to San Francisco. And he left it here, at The Luggage Store on Market at 6th Street. Strachan’s project, Where We Are Is Always Miles Away is, quite literally, art made out of everyday reality—the transformation of a mundane urban fixture into a truly ominous spectacle.

In a nutshell Strachan got approval, and assistance, from the City of New Haven, Connecticut to remove a roughly 20 square foot chunk of sidewalk from Crown Street, near Yale. This included about a half-foot of the earth below, the concrete, bits of urban detritus like cigarette butts and bottle caps, a parking meter, a street sign, and “the accompanying air." At no cost to the artist the City provided a work crew that excavated the site under his direction and then replaced what they removed with new materials, essentially returning the site to its previous condition. The excavated materials were trucked to San Francisco and hoisted with a telescoping forklift into The Luggage Store’s 2nd floor gallery where they will be on view in a hermetically sealed, hexagonal, aluminum and glass container through January 6th. I should also hasten to mention that the climate inside the container—the light level and air temperature—have been calibrated to match those of New Haven at the time of extraction.

It’s tempting to align Strachan with the likes of Gordon Matta-Clark and Robert Smithson. Matta-Clark’s Reality Properties: Fake Estates and Smithson’s Non-Sites both come to mind. He certainly has their audacity, but I think these comparisons are ultimately superficial and do little to help illuminate Where We Are… Surely Strachan’s work has it’s art historical antecedents, the work of Donna Dennis and Glen Seator also come to mind, but Strachan seems far more interested in reality and its displacement than in recreating it or merging with it.

Untitled, 2006. 20" x 30" light box (documentation of Crown Street excavation).

The accompanying documentation, also on display at The Luggage Store, bares this out. It is crucial to Strachan that we understand the chunk of New Haven, now here, used to be there. And this makes me think of photography, or rather some of the rhetoric surrounding photography—that kind of displacement of the real across time and space. Albeit the “photograph” in question is life-scale and three dimensional, it is also severed from it’s original context and sealed off from our touch—available only to our gaze and intellectual consideration. Too, it has, at least temporarily, escaped time. A feeling that is heightened by the fixed temperature (46º F), static internal lighting, and, perhaps most poignantly, by the parking meter which has permanently expired.

Portal, 2006. From the installation, Where We Are Is Always Miles Away.

Where We Are… is nothing less than the halting of life, but it is in this literalizing of photography’s metaphors (cutting, stealing, freezing, displacing) that Strachan’s project breaks with photography. “This is” as opposed to “this was”—the chunk of Crown Street sidewalk is an irreducible fact, indifferent to viewers’ stares, but none-the-less resistant to our tendency to overlook such common things, or even to seeing them as generic signs pointing to the homogenization of American cities. The seemingly abject object at the center of Where We Are… is imbibed with place, highly specific, and contingent because of it—evidence that similar does not mean identical and that, at least for the time being, we are not able to manufacture the World’s double—though this would appear to be the logical outcome (or sinister fantasy) of our seemingly endless preoccupation with reproducing reality. Surrounded by virtual realities even an obstinate segment of sidewalk can fall into doubt as to its authenticity. So despite all its inert matter Where We Are… has an almost ethereal presence in my memory as if it might have been a hologram or specter from a future where the only purpose of the real is to be preserved as historical artifact.

Where We Are Is Always Miles Away will be on view at The Luggage Store through January 6th, 2007. More information can be had at http://www.luggagestoregallery.org/

Post Script: The press release for Where We Are… mentions Strachan’s interest in myth and storytelling and this project seems destined to become just that—art world mythology that lives on through it’s retelling. But isn’t this always the case with successful projects? I have to admit to some skepticism (or was it cynicism) before seeing Strachan’s project. The project narative has some inconsistancies and makes some far-fetched claims. But in person Where We Are… effectively suspends disbelief, or at least calls into question one's questioning. Much credit belongs to Laurie Lazer and Darryl Smith of The Luggage Store for bringing this project to fruition and bringing it to San Francisco. We are lucky to have such a committed and adventurous venue for contemporary art.