CHICAGO — Torkwase Dyson’s multi-disciplinary practice challenges colonial and anti-Black art historical distinctions that manifest as a fundamental distinction between representation and abstraction. Her oeuvre of paintings and sculptures theorizes a Black spatiotemporal materiality related to Rizvana Bradley’s “anteaesthetics”: The idea that only by tracing the racial and gendered tropes that sit between Black existence and erasure without hope of rectifying them can we begin to perceive the nuances of Black aesthesis anterior to the violence of aesthetics.
In her first solo exhibition at Gray’s Chicago Gallery, which stretches across each of its three distinct spaces, Dyson engages Bradley’s anteaesthetic via a distinct yet interrelated improvisational process she calls “Black Compositional Thought,” which she describes as working “from the black-inside-black position” between representing Black geographies both psychic and spatial and a politicized abstraction rooted in the degradation of our climate. Across recent exhibitions at New York’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery and the New Orleans Museum of Art, Dyson formed a Black feminist ecocritical (ante)aesthetic at the intersection of abstraction and the reverberating trauma of a 1919 anti-Black murder and race riot on Chicago’s South Side, and an engagement with the architectures of oil and gas refinement, respectively.
Here, Dyson loosens the spatial frame further. Her point of departure is Chicago’s South Shore Cultural Center and its surrounding geography. From here, a monumental sculpture, paintings of state changes, and small-scale constructions that play with opacity and translucency abstract a familiar environment without, as the artist puts it in the exhibition materials, promising stability. This (ante)aesthetic is formally developed as the viewer moves through the gallery, confronted with the indeterminacy of relations of scale and material legibility.
Passing through the foyer in the yawning converted warehouse, the viewer encounters “Aya” (all works 2024), an immense sculpture composed of two cantilevered semi-circles constructed with graphite, wood, and steel. This work picks up on her recent development of monumentalizing her abstract painterly constructions, riffing on scale to critique the failures of public infrastructure. Upon first encounter, “Aya” seems like a barrier scaled for institutional acquisition with small rectangular cuts interrupting the dark luster of steel, and the gleam of graphite-coated wood offering small portholes to a space beyond. Despite its magnitude and gravitas, however, the sculpture does not command space as a monument. Rather, it offers the spectator a variety of desire lines to ambulate the gallery in concert with, rather than in reverence to, it.
A set of new paintings in the second gallery space employ Dyson’s signature compositional approach. Operating on the lower frequencies of the visual spectrum, they elegantly traverse aquatic washes in deep blues and reds, impasto passages that crack under their own weight, and thick daubs that give dimension to jet-black ground. Floating atop are beautifully precise white lines and arcs that interact with geometric shapes, some filled, some only outlined. Most of these paintings — “Dimensioning,” “Reconfiguration,” “Tuning 1” — evoke action and change, with Dyson’s abstruse notation constituting both the geography of their abyssal ground and a body’s hypothetical movement within it.
Tucked down the hall, the third gallery houses eight hypershape constructions in frosted cast glass and graphite-coated wood set atop matching pedestals. Together, they offer a field of related but distinct geometric forms that rhythmically punctuate the visual field. Individually, they play with the expectations of materials, the precarious distinction between positive and negative space, and the scalar indeterminacy that would distinguish an architectural structure from a model. Situated after the embodied relation to “Aya”’s monumentality and the projective schematics of the paintings at the narrative end of the exhibition — one must then pass back through the previous galleries to exit — these hypershapes inaugurate a broader ecological (ante)aesthetics with poignant uncertainty.
Torkwase Dyson: Of Line and Memory continues at Gray gallery (2044 West Carroll Avenue) through January 25. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
