Torkwase Dyson

Working in painting, drawing and sculpture, Beacon, New York–based artist Torkwase Dyson (born 1973) combines expressive mark-making and geometric abstraction to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure and architecture. Dyson deconstructs, distills and interrogates the built environment, exploring how individuals, particularly Black and brown people, negotiate, negate and transform systems and spatial order. She confronts issues of environmental liberation and envisions a path toward a more equitable future. Of Line and Memory draws from years of Dyson’s own research and spatial memory of navigating the waterways and urban architecture of Chicago. Using the South Shore Cultural Center, a lakeshore landmark with rich historical and architectural significance, as a point of departure, Dyson extracts, reduces and refines architectural and visual cues into geometric shapes and painterly abstractions.

In her multidisciplinary practice guided by her working philosophy of Black Compositional Thought, New York–based Torkwase Dyson (born 1973) creates curvilinear and rectangular hypershapes and abstractions that speak to infrastructures of liberation and resistance. Dyson's recent exhibition at Pace Gallery in New York, with its site-specific installations and layered paintings, explored these geometries on an architectural scale, inviting viewers into new spatial and perceptual practices. The accompanying publication likewise asks readers to engage with the forms and actions that make up a book. Composed of one bound paper book and a diverse array of unbound materials—including acrylic, vellum, acetate and accordion-folded paper, all contained in a slipcase—it is as much an art object as it is an addendum to the exhibition. It also includes new writing by Dionne Brand, LeRonn P. Brooks, Saidiya Hartman, Jaleh Mansoor and Mabel Wilson, and a conversation with Christina Sharpe.