Torkwase Dyson: Of Line and Memory

Evoking her interactions with Chicago's urban geography, Dyson's steel and wood constructions and abstract paintings create a new road map for navigating the built environment

Working in painting, drawing and sculpture, Beacon, New York-based artist Torkwase Dyson (born 1973) combines expressive mark-making and geometric abstraction to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure and architecture. Dyson deconstructs, distills and interrogates the built environment, exploring how individuals, particularly Black and brown people, negotiate, negate and transform systems and spatial order. She confronts issues of environmental liberation and envisions a path toward a more equitable future. Of Line and Memory draws from years of Dyson's own research and spatial memory of navigating the waterways and urban architecture of Chicago. Using the South Shore Cultural Center, a lakeshore landmark with rich historical and architectural significance, as a point of departure, Dyson extracts, reduces and refines architectural and visual cues into geometric shapes and painterly abstractions.