
Bird and Lava
Bird and Lava
A project by Torkwase Dyson
Wexner Center for the Arts Visual Artist Residency Award 2020
The Wexner Center for the Arts Visual Artist Residency Award 2020 has been granted to me during a moment of
isolation and the ongoing state violence. I'm using this
digital platform as a method of communication during this
trying time. The first part of this residency will live here and
contain notes and research ideas that otherwise would be shared
in person. It is a living document.

Note:
architecture
surfaces
infrastructure
magnitude
distance
proximity
movement
black hauntology
modulation
ocean
ontology
here
Space is a relative material

Note:
Dedicated to Paul R. Williams
Note:
to be of space
to be of scale
to be of blue
to be of black

The Tower



Note:
state change,
always state change

Note:
There is no universal now, there is a subjective here.
Expanded
Concrete Abstract
Expanded perception
Expanded Awareness
Expanded

Dark Black
the installation (WEX)













Note
Construction as a way of knowing who she is. Pilot and her box.




Note:
here i am way over there inside me
Note:
If systemic oppression is a form, systemic liberation is as well. I look into histories where methods of liberation live. And what I see my ancestors want me to know.
Note:
In this moment my questions are of scale, movement, perception, distance and state change. More concretely my questions focus on built environments of the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and modernism's participation in the horrors of climate change and dispossession. It is a very simple ambition, and that is to consider spatial strategies of black and indigenous people across the world as foundations of invention as we make livable worlds.
Note:
This drawing has become and object in the round.
-Glissant's questions of opacity and transparency
has become a mediation in architecture.
This drawing/architecture is based on the understanding that there are multiple liberation strategies in the age of the Plantationocene.
Some quotidian and some phenomenological .
Note:
Scale-modularity
Has scale been a friend of freedom? Robin D. G. Kelly evoked this question.