Ash Arder, Broadcast #4, 2024

Wood, plastic crates, Black Bottom Detroit soil, brass, hardware, seeds, paper, speakers, mixer, drum machine, audio cables, and sound composition. Dimensions variable

Courtesy of the Artist

In Ash Arder’s Broadcast #4, a set of rectangular plywood sculptures are filled with soil, seeds, and sound. Functioning like a sonic gardening tool, the work plays with the dual meaning of broadcasting—in terms of agriculture, the method of randomly scattering seeds across a large area and, in a broader sense, the transmission of sound. Speakers embedded beneath the soil are connected to brass pipes that hold the seeds of collard greens.The sound emitted from the pipes is a visceral, heartbeat-like thud that play for the duration of the exhibition. Broadcast #4 will be activated during a closing performance by Arder, in which she will draw inspiration from an album recorded live in 1962 at Dixwell’s historic Monterey Club: Johnny “Hammond” Smith’s Black Coffee. The vibrations from this culminating sound piece will lift the seeds out of the brass tubes and across the beds of soil into a new position, ready for germination. By engaging with history and materials as a composer, Arder turns broadcasting into a semantic, physical, and technical proposition. 

Torkwase Dyson, Indeterminacy #3 (Black Compositional Thought), 2022

Acrylic, wood, and graphite on canvas. 96 × 66 × 6 in (244 x 168 x 15 cm)

Courtesy of the Artist and Pace Gallery

Two perpendicular rectangles, looming over the viewer’s body, form Torkwase Dyson’s painting Indeterminacy #3 (Black Compositional Thought). A latitudinal wooden cord spans both panels, cutting across contrasting textures that reveal and obscure geometric shapes. Glimmers of forms oscillate between emergence and disappearance within the drenched black surface of the canvas. In these varied means of obfuscation, the painting prompts the viewer to consider concealment more broadly, as in the historical strategies of liberation practiced by those who were enslaved. Pre-Abolition freedom seekers like Harriet Jacobs, Henry (Box) Brown, and Anthony Burns were among the many Black Americans who contorted their bodies into shapes that seemed humanly impossible. They oriented themselves within rigid spaces such as triangles, rectangles and curves. These shapes were subsequently used to transport themselves out of the institution of slavery in the South, to the North of the United States. Through abstraction and a dark palette, Indeterminacy #3 (Black Compositional Thought) conjures histories of enforced migration, bodily distortion and contortion under systems of subjugation. 

Lungiswa Gqunta, Benisiya Ndawoni, 2020—ongoing

Thread, sage, fabric and barbed wire. Dimensions variable

Courtesy of the Artist

Composed of razor wire wrapped in sage, imphepho, and fabric, and tied with red string, Lungiswa Gqunta’s installation drawing Benisiya Ndawoni extends as a continuous line that traverses the walls, ceiling, and floor of the gallery. Benisiya Ndawoni, which roughly translates from isiXhosa to “where were you going,” is a haptic and bodily invitation to confront the violence of imposed borders and systemic barriers to access. Razor wire is used domestically in South Africa as a fencing material to guard homes, as well as a tool for state-sanctioned control often employed during protest marches. It is a ubiquitous and mundane feature of daily life in South Africa and stands as a vestige of tactics used during Apartheid. The sharp lines of the razor wire reference potential migratory patterns across a landscape. The artist’s act of wrapping is an intervention that invokes ancestral presence and offers guidance for the people who have traversed and will continue to navigate systematic violence through migration. 

Lungiswa Gqunta, With My Softness I Carve Mountains, 2021–ongoing

Mixedmedia installation. Dimensions variable

Courtesy of the Artist

With My Softness I Carve Mountains is an installation of sculptures, video and drawing. Curvilinear and cone-shaped steel sculptures slowly rust as water evaporates from them. The sculptures are intuitively placed by the artist, Lungiswa Gqunta, in front of a darkened brown wall with chalk tracings, along with a video projection of herself, which spills onto the floor towards the viewer. Soft words are spoken in isiXhosa, the artist’s mother tongue, as she recounts a personal dream, creating a form of communication with her ancestors across different realms. Shown without subtitles, the video preserves the recounting of Gqunta’s dream as an ancestral, rather than a mortal, communication. As with Gqunta’s other installation in this gallery, With My Softness I Carve Mountains incorporates scent to engage the viewer’s sense of smell, and the work also raises critical questions about access, beauty, violence, and erosion of the landscape and body to illuminate histories of Black people across South Africa during the Apartheid era. 

Oluseye, Eminado Series, 2018–ongoing

Found objects, rubber, synthetic hair, and cowry shells. Dimensions variable

Courtesy of the Artist

The constellation of objects from Oluseye’s Eminado Series spans across two walls of the gallery. “Diasporic debris” is the phrase coined by the artist to describe these scavenged and collected materials, such as black reclaimed rubber and found objects recovered from coastlines, taxi stands, markets, and dance floors across densely populated Black communities and neighborhoods. Eminado sets are reunited, coming together as a record of the artist’s personal travels and the migration patterns of the Black diaspora across Brazil, Mozambique, South Africa, Nigeria, and Canada. Each Eminado is installed relative to the geographic location in which the object was initially found. Oluseye places these sculptures in surprising and stark juxtapositions, pairing razors with children’s toys, and hair combs with telephone wire and cowrie shells. 

Oluseye, Good Luck Totem, 2023–ongoing

Vending machine, cowrie shells, and timber. 63 × 12 × 12 in (160 x 30 x 30 cm)

Courtesy of the Artist

Good Luck Totem is a playful moment of reclamation. Oluseye fills a nonfunctional vending machine with cowrie shells that sits on top of a charred wooden base. Cowrie shells have been used as important symbols of wealth, currency, and spiritual connection for centuries, particularly in African and African diasporic communities. The shells presented in this vending machine reveal the multiple functions and meanings of such objects—which, in this work, seem to represent a form of symbolic currency. The artist has preserved the shells as a collection of sorts, yet one that is inaccessible to the viewer, thus pointing to the contradictions inherent in the idea of cultural preservation. 

To Echo a Shadow 

Listening Space

Accompanying the exhibition is a dedicated space. Visitors are encouraged to consider their individual and generational experiences of migration and industrialization through sound. With a selection of iconic records from jazz musicians who passed through Dixwell, this space is for the community to listen, engage, and share.