Torkwase Dyson’s work is informed by the large and small ways freedom is expressed and new worlds are imagined in opposition to the tangled violences of environmental exploitation and systems of oppression. Questions of movement and scale are present across her work employing sculpture, drawing, architectural planning, painting, performance, animation, and writing. In Dyson’s practice the poetics of improvisation and acts of embodied refusals are expressed through lines and geometries indelibly tied to space and perception. Dyson focuses especially on the history of Black spatial liberation strategies in the context of American life. Her seemingly abstract works question form and space from the perspective of the experiences of black and brown bodies. In a new installation work, Dyson has conducted a research process that continues her longrunning, largescale formal architectural series. I Belong to the Distance 3, (Force Multiplier) merges these enquiries with an investigation of Korean “post”-colonial and intergenerational infrastructural and environmental violence. Along with a humanscaled sculpture referencing joined spatial forms of these traumas, turning the shape language of colonization into abstractions to be embodied, Dyson has collaborated with Seoulbased choreographer Kwon Lyoneun to create a new series of performances bridging the histories of Black and Korean environmental life. Complementing and witnessing the work, research, and formal attributes of the new sculpture, Dyson has assembled an installation consisting of drawing, writing, and objects that have been made in part in the artist’s studio in Beacon, New York, and part inprocess while in Seoul. Kujichagulia (Planning Freedom) comes together as a mental map of a broad range of research, of the act of sketching and drawing from long study and immediate impression. They are deconstructions of the components of Dyson’s large sculptural work here, and elaborations of its connected readings, observations, writing, and formal experiments, as well as the process of her practice as a whole.
