
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

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

The Tower



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state change,
always state change

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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.




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here i am way over there inside me
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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.
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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.


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What are the spatial dependencies of these geometries, i'm calling hypershapes? Are they plantation economies? Are the liberations that inevitably come as a result of plantation economies. Are they from the horrors of extraction?

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If Blackness is already an architectonic developed out of liquidity (ocean), can the work embody this phenomenon and offer sensation (sensoria) at the register of liberation? The infrastructure of this question, for me, exists in the hypershapes; a geometric abstraction culled from Black histories and responsive to our ecosystem now and in our future.
Note:
This text is always with me.
The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Post-Date (1994)
Hortense J. Spillers
The model that I am proposing would be based on a theorization that melds various aspects of the human sciences and a mode of culture analysis for which we currently have no name, but one might think of it as a cultural demography; this new "science" would be alert to the cultural implications of movement, which is not only a primary meaning of the life-world but one of its most significant literary trope--the "symbolic geography" that would explain (1) diasporic movement, (2) internal migration, and (3) the mechanisms of fantasy and ambition that contextualize African American struggle.

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In this project Bird and Lava, I've found an overall form that speaks to the history of Black spatial liberations strategies. I've constructed a form by drawing, sketching, and modeling these vast geographic, architectural, and infrastructural spaces used for liberation. I've found my way to a method and mode of expression that regards these histories as necessary throughways to navigating the systems of self liberation. This work/shape/form has become a mediation for me at this moment of solitude where I can simply honor deep freedom.
Note:
There is not universal now, there is a subjective here.
Expanded
Concrete
Expanded Abstraction
Expanded Perception
Expanded Awareness
Expanded
Explode
Note:
I made these drawings surrounded by water and people I love. It was a year ago on a small table with cards and gin.
9x12 in. Graphite and pen on paper



