Water, water everywhere nor any drop to drink.

So Coleridge’s drifting sailors bemoaned and so — in a way — it is to grow up on a tropical island. The turquoise sea brings the tourists, supporting much of the island’s community but does not sustain life beyond being home to the grouper and conch. Water defines existence, from the ocean to the Aquapure trucks that deliver the drinkable kind and the ubiquitous ice machines at every gas station.

Ice and snow in their natural form, however, are elements of myth, gems of fascination in the imagination of every Bahamian child and in particular that of Tavares Strachan, the Nassau-born artist who in 2005 started a quest, which he entitled The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want, to bring these precious objects back to his childhood world.

Before the miracle could be materialized in the yard of Strachan’s former school, the Albury Sayle Primary in Nassau, he set off to the Arctic Circle with the Herculean task of cutting out a four-ton cubic block of ice from a frozen river, and then — after carefully storing and preserving it under layers of sawdust for over a year — shipping the insulated block to its tropical destination. There, in July 2006, the alien object from a world far beyond the horizon was hosted in Strachan’s Chamber of Ice Elevator for the Reversal of Up and Down, a glass-sided unit whose temperature was maintained through refrigeration powered by solar panels. During one of the hottest months in the Bahamian summer, the sun itself secured the continuation of the ice’s existence.

The first man to reach the North Pole, Admiral Robert Peary, raised a flag bearing the colours of the Commonwealth and emblazoned with a P (for Peary). When Strachan arrived at Mount McKinley he raised a similar banner, this time emblazoned with a T and in the Bahamian colours: turquoise, yellow and black, representing the sea, the sun and the people. This action, placing Strachan in the leader’s position, alludes to the historical reality that people of colour were relegated to supporting roles, even if their input was key: it is little known that Peary was supported by the African-American explorer Matthew Alexander Henson (1866-1955).

The history of the Bahamas as part of the British Empire — which it was until 1973 — is referred to in a performative part of the installation: a standing guard is dressed in the British colonial-style uniform still worn before the Parliament and court houses, but with the white military dress jacket traded in for one cut from a cloth of the same turquoise as the Bahamian flag. Finally, with another subtle element in the form of two fans which blow simultaneously at the rate of the current winds in Alaska and Nassau, the piece moves far beyond a metaphor for nature on life-support or the very obvious issue of global warming, and becomes a poetic statement that captures a sense of longing and displacement. While the black in the flag might represent the island population’s majority, this ethnic group is nonetheless no more native to the Bahamas than the white forebears of mine who ruthlessly brought their ancestors from Africa; furthermore, any Bahamian that longs for a future more unusual than that which is offered in our small paradise — a future that would be based on either the tourist or service industries — must leave home to achieve it.

In bringing this slice of the Arctic to Nassau, a frozen incarnation of a dream, Strachan did much more than simply make a fantasy reality or create a kind of Wunderkammer. Strachan showed the unseen, unearthed layers and offered a hidden path and perspective to all those who are eager to discover.