Torkwase Dyson and John Trevino bring attention to the particularities of ocean environments and human interactions with it historically and today.

MINE MIND

Torkwase Dyson’s work—conceptual, abstract and video—centers on the Atlantic basin. She considers notions of enslavement and emancipation that are evoked within the Atlantic ocean’s DNA. Dyson sees the human body as a vessel that carries memory into the present. She engages design and shipbuilding technology to map the movements of human beings and cargo in variously uneven economic agreements. Dyson also sees the ocean’s body and considers how her resources are mined, extracted and exploited. She traces Atlantic points from east to west to excavate individual stories that relate to the voluntary and involuntary movements of people and current markets. To Know the Curve is a series inspired by Anthony Burns, an enslaved man who, by hiding in the hull of a merchant ship, escaped from Stafford County to Boston, Massachusetts in 1853. In this series, Ms. Dyson focuses on Burns's first trip as a runaway to explore how ship architecture used for emancipation impacts the mind and body.

Torkwase Dyson will also be exhibiting Studio South Zero, which is a tiny, traveling, solar powered art studio. Studio South Zero is a social and environmental art practice focused on bringing solar technology, architecture, sculpture, and preparedness place making to small-underutilized urban sites.

Ms. Dyson’s work has been exhibited at Franconia Sculpture Park, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran College of Art and Design, the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. She has been awarded the Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists, Spelman College Art Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Council grant, Yale University Barry Cohen Scholarship, the Yale University Paul Harper Residency at Vermont Studio Center, Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practices, FSP/Jerome Fellowship and Yaddo. Ms. Dyson is based in Brooklyn, New York and was appointed lecturer in painting/printmaking at Yale in 2015.

SUNKEN CITY
John Trevino’s photographic explorations of the coastal Pacific convey a different, full color contemporary tone. For this series, Trevino convened a gathering of strangers at the the cliffs at San Pedro—along the coast south of Los Angeles—for a series of individual portraits that communicate each sitter’s (or swimmer’s) particular sense of fashion. As each person found his/her way into the aquasphere, with minimal cues, Trevino both disappeared the photographer’s presence and encouraged the sitters to find a comfortable space for expression—movement, personality, etc.—in this lyrical underwater garden. Each portrait captures the light, buoyancy and the breathless weightlessness of this temporal domain. 

Trevino is a ­­Los Angeles based artist, born in 1972 and raised in Long Beach, CA.  He received his B.A. in Black Studies and Art Studio in 1995 from U.C. Santa Barbara and MFA in painting from Howard University in 2000. He has exhibited at District Fine Arts in Washington DC, Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro, and ArtPrize in Grand Rapids.  Most recently his work was selected by the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority to be installed at the USC/37th St Station along the system’s Silver Line.

EXHIBITION SPONSORS

Gardy Bloemer and Nick Duke with additional support by the Women for Art Exhibition Fund