Torkwase Dyson

Curated by Lillian O’Brien Davis, Torkwase Dyson: The Distance Inside Us (Bird and Lava) explores the literal and conceptual spaces of liberation and confinement as a world-building exercise in a time of ecological crisis. Installed across all three gallery spaces, the exhibition is a culmination of an ongoing series entitled Bird and Lava which meditates on the dense and fluid variations of space to emphasize a liminal state of belonging. The artist’s hand is very present in the work, with both expressive marks and diagrammatic lines that speak to a geometric language which the artist refers to as Hypershapes to explore the ways Black and brown bodies create autonomy and liberation out of infrastructures of dispossession and climates of brutality. This navigational ethos, or what the artist calls Black Compositional Thought, is foundational to the way Dyson approaches abstraction through painting, sculpture, drawing, and animation.

Within the exhibition, Dyson draws on the space of The Clearing, a trope from Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, a site where Black people have the freedom of to improvise, to laugh, and to be pluralistic. The Bird and Lava series embraces pluralism, speaking to it as essential for ecological repair.