Torkwase Dyson’s Indeterminacy #1 (Black Compositional Thought) from 2022 presents at architectural scale. Crossing architecture, sculpture, and painting, the piece could be said to present, under the a priori rubric established by the title of Indeterminacy, a “dynamic” rather than a “thing.” That dynamic, in turn, suggests both continuousness and rupture across the disjunct components comprising the unity of the work, even as it seems to multiply across medium, form, texture, support, and surface. This unity is irreducible to number: the work may be made up of two, three, four, or five panels, depending on how the sculptural pieces subsumed under the first encounter are counted. It isn’t clear where one panel component locks into another or if the whole is made of one single support.
At roughly half the height of the work, on the right-hand side, a scorched surface overlaps the conjuncture of multiple pieces. The piece’s planar register, which suggests painting, advances an elegant white line that traverses the two main planes abutting their common horizontal edge. Another thin, delicate white line crosses this at about three-quarters of its height. This intersection mimics and schematizes the way in which the two main panels join to generate corners and joints. On the upper main panel, a black line—which seems to begin as a one-dimensional, equally linear element to echo the white line—surges out into a sculptural form to join the lower main panel.