Torkwase Dyson

Dyson’s recent paintings are inspired by the design systems of architecture, water infrastructure, the oil and gas industry, and the physical impact of global warming. Her work also examines the legacy of plantation economies and their relationship to the environmental and infrastructural issues of our current age, which many characterize as the “plantationocene.” 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.

Artist Website: https://www.torkwasedyson.com