Thursday February 27, 2025
Torkwase Dyson (American, 1973)
Way Over There Inside Me (A Festival of Inches), 2022
Painted steel, glass, painted aluminum, dry-erase marker. 2 Connectors each 203 x 33 x 93 in. 4 Trapezoids each 83 x 40 x 78 in. 2 units each compromised of 1 Connector and 2 Trapezoids 70 x 364 x 93 in. Overall circumference of each unit 364 in.
“Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Examining the history and future of black spatial liberation strategies, Dyson’s abstract works grapple with the ways in which space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by black and brown bodies. The artist has distilled a vocabulary of poetic forms to address the spaciousness of freedom and question what type of climates are born out of world building.” from Pace Gallery
“Dyson 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. Dyson considers spatial relations an urgent question both historically and in the present day. Through abstract paintings, Dyson grapples with ways space is perceived and negotiated. Explorations of how the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself to move through natural and built environments become both expressive and discursive structures within the work.” from artist website
Tonight at 4:30 pm, Dyson presents an artist talk at UC Davis, organized by The California Studio: Manetti Shrem Artist Residences in the Maria Manetti Shrem Art Studio Program. Co-sponsored by the Manetti Shrem Museum.