Scalar, a solo exhibition by Torkwase Dyson, features new paintings, drawings, and sculptures by the artist known for her use of abstraction and modes of inquiry from art, architecture, and geography to explore the production of form within contemporary economic and political climates. With works created in response to the Bennington context, Dyson takes inspiration from the geometric and mathematical formations of the late artist and architectural designer Tony Smith—an instructor at the College from 1958 to 1961. Dyson approaches her time at Bennington as an opportunity for deep reflection on the properties of scale, dimension, and geometry. Artworks on view in Usdan Gallery, including a 12-by-20-foot diptych painted on site, demonstrate the artist’s ongoing development of a vocabulary of forms and gestures that speaks to the history of environmental and spatial politics leading to the Anthropocene era of global crisis.

Although working in multiple mediums, Torkwase Dyson describes herself as a painter who uses distilled geometric abstraction to create an idiosyncratic language both expressive and diagrammatic. Her work has been included in exhibitions in New York at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Martos Gallery, Postmasters Gallery, and We Buy Gold, Brooklyn, as well as at the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education, Philadelphia and the National Museum of African Art, Washington, DC.