RHINEBECK, NY.- ’T’ Space is pleased to present Closer (Bird and Lava), a site-specific installation by Torkwase Dyson. The installation will be composed of large-scale sculptural forms and drawings and will run from June 4 - July 9 at ‘T’ Space Rhinebeck.

Consisting of two site-specific objects that toggle between painting and sculpture, the installation at ‘T’ Space will be an expression of systems, structures, enclosures, and throughways evoking themes of containment and expansion. Shifts in scale take the audience on a journey from the intimacy of the artist’s hand, to industrial conditions of seriality, onto the immeasurable or the improvisational.

Speaking about the ideas behind Closer (Bird and Lava), Dyson said:

"Looking at the environmental implications of dams and levees as extraction developments and infrastructures of dispossession, what comes up are ongoing questions of scale, dimension, geometry and dispossession. What are the transhistorical implications of this and how do we resist with world building based on liveness and environmental self-determination? Yes, I want to embody biospheres that encourage liberation and discursive state-change."

Dyson’s abstract compositions re-imagine geometric abstraction through the lens of history and black liberation. At ‘T’ Space, her drawings and installations will combine multiple experiences of elevations, texture, hinges, enclosures, line, and perspective.

"[Dyson’s] work is never figurative, or narrative. Yet every mark and shape somehow channels Dyson’s studies, whether of the early modern world economy, or climate change today; how landscape, infrastructure and the built environment have been shaped in ways that devalue Black life; and how Black people nevertheless not only endure, but thrive." - The New York Times, 2022

This exhibition is the third in a series expanding her ongoing Bird and Lava project with concurrent exhibitions at the Mildred Lane Kemper Museum in St. Louis and Counterpublic, St. Louis’ citywide public art triennial. ‘T’ Space will publish a brochure on the occasion of the exhibition. The brochure will compile all of her research since she began working on Bird and Lava during her residency at Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the Arts in 2020. The brochure will be an important resource that collects and distills the ideas behind this major chapter in the artist’s career.

The exhibition takes its name from a text Dyson wrote in 2019:

"In this moment of environmental precarity we will need to be both liquid and mountains, bird and lava. And it is the density of black grace that will always be the thing that keeps us in our own humanity. Thinking through the histories of black liberation, these are the victories that fortify my being in the objects I make."

Torkwase Dyson is an artist working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Her work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Dyson’s recent monumental outdoor pieces in high-profile biennials like Desert X (2023) and the Sharjah Biennial (2022) and her critically-acclaimed solo exhibitions at Pace London (2021) and Pace New York (2022) reveal the significant momentum behind the artist’s work. Additional solo exhibitions include Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine (2018); Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago (2018); and Arthur Ross Gallery at Columbia University, New York, NY (2019). Additionally, Dyson’s work has been included in group exhibitions at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and California African American Museum, Los Angeles.

This exhibition is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.

'T' Space was founded in 2010 by the Steven Myron Holl Foundation to cross-pollinate art, architecture, music, and poetry. Exhibited artists include Ai Weiwei, Martin Puryear, Pat Steir, Carolee Schneeman, Agnieszka Kurant, Brice Marden, and Richard Tuttle.

Torkwase Dyson will integrate the unique characteristics of the ‘T’ Space gallery— its T-shaped layout, 15.5-foot ceilings, light open- ings, intimate scale, and woodland setting—into her installation Closer (Bird and Lava).

’T’ Space has become a special place in the terrain of contemporary art and architecture where visitors can experience hybrids of the visual arts, poetry, music, and the natural landscape through commissions, public events, educational programs, and buildings, bringing aesthetic forms together in a kind of spiritual renewal that
challenges the endless commodi5cation of culture, ecology, and the built environment.

– Critic Stephen Zacks