Torkwase Dyson: A Liquid Belonging
Pace Gallery, New York
November 11 – December 17, 2022
Symbolic Geography #3 (Hypershape), 2022
© Torkwase Dyson, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents an exhibition of new site-specific sculptural installations by TORKWASE DYSON, whose multidisciplinary practice spans painting, sculpture, performance, film, and drawing. Titled A Liquid Belonging, the artist’s exhibition is concerned with embodied experiences that refuse brut infrastructure in the legacy of Modernism in favor of new spatial expectations that inspire liveness and acknowledgements of multisensory belonging.
For many years, the artist has understood 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 Torkwase 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, Torkwase Dyson invites viewers into spatial and perceptual practices that affirm improvisation, indeterminacy, and migration.
Torkwase Dyson’s unique curvilinear and rectangular hypershapes, which can be found in her work across mediums, speak to infrastructures of liberation and resistance. Dyson’s art is guided by her working philosophy of Black Compositional Thought, through which she considers the ways that architectures, geographies, throughways, enclosures, paths, and other physical and non-physical spaces are composed and inhabited by Black and brown bodies throughout history. Black Compositional Thought, in the artist’s words, also “considers how properties of energy, space, scale, and sound interact as networks of liberation.”
For Torkwase Dyson, A Liquid Belonging is an experiment in shifting scales. The new, monumental sculptures that will be on view across two floors of Pace’s New York gallery reflect the artist’s expansions of her theories on movement, geography, perception, and material. These site-specific, never-before-seen sculptures will occupy the entirety of Pace’s first and seventh floor exhibition spaces. The dynamic abstractions that constitute these works—which Torkwase Dyson forges from her distinctive vocabulary of shapes, geometries, lines, and edges—address how individuals negotiate and negate various systems and spatial orders.
Torkwase Dyson considers the juxtapositions between her touch of hand and use of industrial materials “discursive refusals” that range from the intimacy of mark making to new world building. The multifaceted, sprawling, steel and graphite sculptural installation that is presented on the gallery’s first floor is made up of shifting weights, textures, and forms to meditate on the connections between scale and movement, enactments of precarity, and the social and political impacts of the climate crisis.
With Torkwase Dyson’s interest in the inherent possibilities of a multiscalar approach to environmental liberation this installation engages histories of racial and global capitalism, trade, and extraction across oceans, waterways, cities, industries, and other built and natural environments.
Pace’s seventh floor showcases a new trapezoidal installation made of wood. Descending from the building’s eighth floor balcony and cutting diagonally across the gallery space, this work will invite viewers to pass under and around it, like a pathway. A new wall-mounted sculptural work, Symbolic Geography #3 (Hypershape) (2022), is exhibited alongside this installation, reflecting Torkwase Dyson's embodied experiences of shifting scales between space, time, and distance.
In recent years, Torkwase Dyson (b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Hall Art Foundation at Schloss Derneburg in Germany. Her work currently figures in the traveling group exhibition A Movement in Every Direction: Legacies of the Great Migration, which opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art on October 30. In 2023, the artist will participate in the Liverpool Biennial in the United Kingdom; the Manchester International Festival in the United Kingdom; the Counterpublic triennial in St. Louis; and Desert X in Palm Springs.
PACE GALLERY
540 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001
