Torkwase Dyson: Black Compositional Thought | 15 Paintings for the Plantationocene
Co-Curated by Katie Pfohl and Allison K. Young
January 24 - April 19, 2019
New Orleans Museum of Art
Torkwase Dyson employs abstract shapes and forms as a means of exploring the intersections of environmental liberation, movement, and architecture. Within her practice, she has developed a unique vocabulary of abstract lines, forms, shapes, and edges informed by her own evolving theory of Black Compositional Thought. This working term considers how waterways, architecture, objects, and geographies are composed and inhabited by black bodies, and how the properties of energy, space, and scale can form networks of liberation.
Produced for the New Orleans Museum of Art, this new series of fifteen paintings is about composition. These works are inspired by the design systems of architecture, water infrastructure, the oil and gas industry, and the physical impact of global warming. The exhibition 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.” Injecting these spatial constructions with a sense of precarity and emancipatory possibility, Dyson asserts new perspectives on geography, imagination, and belonging. As she writes, “I am interested in how the illusion of space pushes up against real space on a two-dimensional surface … and how the compression of the two produces something indeterminate, modular, poetic, haptic, and unsteady.”
Dyson draws a connection between the abstract forms of her art, and the networks of industrialized white supremacist power that shape our political landscape: histories of spatial segregation, policing and vagrancy laws, and other “exclusions of subjectivity” that often hide in the abstractions of machines, maps, and data. Her practice takes up abstraction as a tool for reshaping our current political landscape, and reimagining these systems from within.
Torkwase Dyson, Up South 3 (Water Table) and Up South 4 (Water Table), 2018, Acrylic on canvas, 60 in. diameter
Selected Press
Kristina Kay Robinson for Burnaway
“While uprisings and protests have been underway, monuments to slaveholders across the country have been ripped from their plinths, including the bust of John McDonogh in New Orleans. The day I visited Dyson’s Black Compositional Thought, I considered McDonogh’s early-nineteenth-century manumission scheme in which enslaved people could “buy” their deportation to Liberia after fifteen years of labor. The abstract shapes created by Dyson became new stories as I imagined the persons and personalities of those who animate these abstractions. As such, it is that beam of light—that ethereal moment before the image is “captured”—where freedom and autonomy may lie for Black subjectivity, where the existence of a new or fabulous visual language for Black life arises and introduces the possibility for action, one that might mean Ahmaud Arbery could be alive and jogging again today.” Read More
Erica Rawles for Artforum
“In a particularly distinctive pair of works jointly titled Interstitial Being (Architecture and Flesh #13, 14) (all works 2020), deep-charcoal-colored washes with subtle blue undertones made up the backgrounds, while three large black forms slightly overlapped to create one collaged shape in the foregrounds. The shapes seemed to cover fine white lines that appeared briefly, like accents in Dyson’s vocabulary. Each individual shape was roughly triangular, but with rounded edges, resembling a boat’s sail. While one of the three forms on each canvas had a smooth finish, the remaining two were created from layers of thick black paint. The gallery lights, bouncing off the paintings, highlighted their rich textures and gave them a sheen evoking that of petroleum.” Read More
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