Torkwase Dyson is a painter of rigorous attention to scale, condition and shape. Her imaginative field is black life, black fugitivity, black wayfinding, black ecology, black infrastructure, and how space is changed and charged through the presence of blackness. Her method, Black Compositional Thought, builds a visual language from “hypershapes” that relate to moments of black self-emancipation. The hypershape becomes a way to pose questions about the enslaved, what they had to know, how they conceptualised space, and the violent worlds in which they found themselves. What are the angles and dimensions of Black freedom? What is a Black sustaining architecture?
Tougaloo is a large-scale painting installation that includes architectonic sculptures and sound. Dyson studied at Tougaloo College, in Mississippi, on a campus that mixes nineteenth- century and Modernist architectures. The project arises from her knowledge of Tougaloo as a former plantation and a black expanse, a space of education, liberation, protest and deep care. It asks, What is a geography for life?
Dyson’s installations and paintings are arc and ribcage, overhang and surface. Cement and graphite conjure water, extraction, hum, breath and its absence. Sonic wavelength becomes another material to extend a line and expand a field. Her works are studies in possibility, where a curve, a line, a wave, a sound/ing are acts of holding and practices towards liberation.
—Christina Sharpe
