In writing about the work of Tavares Strachan, the art critic Stamatina Gregory states that “language itself inevitably involves questions of power relations and forms of domination,” and the title of the artist’s first exhibition at Fergus McCaffrey, St. Barth, How Can Someone Be Made Invisible?, offers a great deal to ponder.

Depending on whether one adopts a benign or malevolent tone, this title could be read as a plea for social justice, a punch line from a magician’s act, a coldly framed question for biological inquiry, or an outcry for historical revisionism. In tracking Strachan’s impressive career over the last decade, it seems fair to assume that being Made Invisible interests the artist mostly in political and scientific terms.

But geography also needs to be considered. Given that the artist grew up in the Caribbean on Nassau, capital of the former British colony that is now the Commonwealth of the Bahamas, and that the exhibition takes place 1,000 miles to the southeast on the French-speaking island of St. Barthelémy, the choice of the exhibition site and its relative periphery/invisibility vis-à-vis the centers of art world power are far from accidental.

Significant also are the specificity of Strachan’s materials and his practice of teaching schoolchildren. Geologically, 80 percent of the structure of the Bahamas is made up of calcium carbonate (the scientific name for chalk), and How to Make Someone Invisible is a white chalk facsimile of Strachan’s blackboard diagram from a discussion between a group of schoolchildren and him on the topic of invisibility in culture. The conversation began with archaeology and the study of ancient village life, grew into a discussion about the types of artifacts that are discovered, and evolved into an analysis of the economic and political forces that affect what gets protected or forgotten.

Uriah McPhee replicates the schoolroom furniture that Strachan occupied during his childhood. Removed by distance from any direct access to masterpieces of the Western art canon, he gained most of his knowledge of the outside world—including art—through highly edited and now defunct encyclopedias such as World Book and Encyclopedia Britannica. In turn, Strachan has appropriated, updated, amended, and added his own entries into the brazenly authoritative references of his youth, like Y and Z.

Strachan studied the properties and manufacture of glass at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale, and characteristically, the material properties and narrative possibilities of glass have inspired him. In the past, the artist made glass from sand that he collected on the beaches of Nassau, such as for the 2008–9 work Blast Off; and glass sculptures are also a critical component of the St. Barth exhibition.

In keeping with the diagrammatic nature of the How to Make Someone Invisible sculpture, Us, We, Them is a neon Venn diagram of overlapping circles of turquoise (Us) and yellow (Them)—the two predominant colors of the Bahamian flag. The common green area (We) exists optically as a result of the mixing of the two primary colors before our eyes, and it corresponds with the multiracial and multicultural diversity of the Caribbean that emerged from the duress of politics, trade, and slavery centuries ago.

The Invisibles (Jack Johnson) refers back to the invisibility in history of the African American world heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson (1878– 1946). Strachan’s technical prowess with glass and materials is seen to its fullest in these vitrines, where Johnson’s boxing gloves, a cane, and a wrench float in mineral oil half present and half absent.

Born in Nassau, Bahamas, in 1979, Strachan has gone on to be the subject of many international shows, most notably at the 55th International Venice Biennale, where he represented the Bahamas for the first time. Recent shows also include Prospect .3, in New Orleans, 2014; and La Biennale de Lyon, France, 2013. In 2011, he produced Seen/Unseen an undisclosed exhibition in New York, and Roundabout at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. About