TORKWASE DYSON

In her work across painting, sculpture, performance, film, and drawing, Dyson uncovers continuities between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture through a language of abstract, poetic forms. Her two- and three- dimensional abstractions grapple with the ways in which space is perceived, imagined, and negotiated—particularly by black and brown bodies—to examine histories of human geography and black spatial liberation strategies.

The new works that Dyson is debuting in her presentation at Pace in LA represent the fundamental parts of a large- scale assemblage in memory of black underwater towns. Practicing mindful improvisation in her making process, the artist has imbued these paintings with forms that speak to the beauty and hauntology of black abstraction in motion, or what she calls ‘black compositional thought.’

This upcoming exhibition in LA is a continuation of Dyson’s ongoing Bird and Lava series, which she began making in 2020 and first exhibited at Pace’s East Hampton gallery that year. With the paintings and drawings in this body of work, the artist poses a multifaceted expression of a question: ‘If blackness is already an architectonic developed out of liquidity (ocean), can the work embody this phenomenon and offer sensation (sensoria) at the register of liberation?’

Having created a compositional system of curvilinear and rectilinear shapes to apply across all her Bird and Lava works, Dyson articulates histories of enslavement, displacement, and resistance through the phenomenological presence of geometric abstraction, dimensionality, and gesture. For her latest paintings in this series—which are the focus of her show at Pace in LA—Dyson has experimented with new material elements, including details rendered in stone. In the artist’s view, the varied textures and geometries that appear throughout this series are thresholds, or portals, through which we might forge new spatial strategies of liberation. Holistically, Dyson’s installation for Here—attuned to enactments of precarity, liminality, and augmentation—invites contemplation and meditation.