TORKWASE DYSON

On view in the exhibition is ‘2000 Black’, ‘2000 Black #5 (Liquid a Place)’. Dyson’s unique curvilinear and rectangular hyper shapes, which can be found in her work across mediums, speak to infrastructures of liberation and resistance. She builds the paintings slowly, accumulating washes, building surface, and configuring minimal geometric elements that lend a productive tension between image and object. The paint-handling producing various visual qualities using brushwork and other tools is made poetic by a juxtaposition of delicate marks and scored diagrammatic lines. This compositional rigor imbues the works with an architectural presence and optical gravity.

Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973, Chicago) describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Dyson’s abstract works are visual and material systems used to construct fusions of surface tension, movement, scale, real and finite space. With an emphasis on the ways black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives, seeking to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies.​ Dyson’s work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Drawing Center, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. Dyson’s recent work explores the idea that we as bodies are often the only water in the room, we navigate space and it imposes upon us as beings composed mostly of water. Simultaneously, Dyson understands water as a geography with an indelible tie to architecture and infrastructure. Growing up in Southeast Chicago, living in Mississippi, and studying the intractable damage of extraction have inspired Dyson to explore different water ecosystems by diving in the global south. The artist’s diving practice is in conversation with her research surrounding relationships between environmental liberation, structural violence, and the bodies of water that make up most of the planet. Her art, which often examines the meanings of poetic movement asserting humanity, is deeply informed by these ideas and practices. Through her dispersals of abstract forms, Dyson invites viewers into spatial and perceptual practices that affirm improvisation, indeterminacy, and migration.