Year: 2022
Medium: graphite on paper
Dimensions: work size: 114.3 x 121.9 cm (45 x 48 in.) frame size: 118.1 x 126.5 cm (46 1/2 x 49 3/4 in.)
Acquired from Pace Gallery, 2023
Torkwase Dyson refers to her constructive reevaluation of space from the perspective of Black people as “Black Compositional Thought,” and this forms the theoretical base of the artist’s creative practice. This approach points to the fact that contemporary society was constructed based on spaces in which, historically speaking, architecture and urban environments were created to socially separate Black people from White people. This work is part of “Liquid a Place,” a series that Dyson has been working on in recent years, based on the proposition that the human body is water in space. Water is the main constituent of both the surface of the Earth and human beings, covering 70% of the former and forming 60% of the latter. The series questions how, if the body is understood as water, this entity should be identified in space. Water freely changes shape to fit any vessel and changes form—gas, liquid, or solid—according to the temperature. At first glance, this mutability seems so free, but looking from the other side, it could also be described as an inability to escape providence or rules. If the history of Black people is a history of resistance against the oppression they have been forced to live under, by substituting water for human beings, regardless of race, in this work, Dyson points to the source of this resistance—the fact that human rights are also independent of race. The work is titled “Edge, Encounter.” “Black Compositional Thought” is presented according to the discourse of geometric abstraction (composition) through the tense, bordered regions where white lines, geometrically dividing the space, encounter areas of spatially distorted black graphite.
