Inside Rhea Dillon’s studio cubicle on the Whitney Unbiased Examine Program (ISP), the artist and author talked quietly about preparations for 3 exhibitions, opening weeks aside over the summer season: her ISP group exhibition; a solo present on the Heidelberger Kunstverein; and a sales space within the Statements part of Artwork Basel Switzerland. Famed for Marxist-leaning, theory-rich seminars, the ISP is a transparent match for the 29-year-old artist, who has quickly transplanted from South London; her work engages a canon of Black and Caribbean historians, novelists, and poets together with Kamau Brathwaite, Beverley Bryan, June Jordan, and Sylvia Wynter.
A second-generation British citizen with household in Jamaica, the artist typically attracts from her correspondence with the Caribbean, and critiques the sociopolitical ceilings inherited with diasporic id. Sculptures reminiscent of Caribbean Ossuary (2022)—included final yr in “Tituba, qui pour nous protéger?” (Tituba, who protects us?) on the Palais de Tokyo in Paris—recommend an immigrant’s aspirational eager for Outdated World luxurious. The work presents a mahogany cupboard, echoing one owned by the artist’s grandmother, tipped on its again and seeming to drift like a ship throughout the gallery ground. Inside, objects from a cut-crystal tea service (for when “the queen got here”) hover atop a mirrored backing.
Dillon typically produces sculptures like this one, crafting visceral portraits of postcolonial Black experiences from on a regular basis objects, symbols, and language. Reflecting on her work’s territorial politics, Dillon mentioned, “I take into consideration land very bodily now—soil, versus geographies or trajectories,” citing American anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones.
Dillon’s 2024 exhibition “An Alterable Terrain” at Tate Britain bridged the physique and its diaspora by way of fauna. She introduced a fragmentary Black lady, abstracted in a sparsely organized constellation of sculptures consultant of eyes, mouth, lungs, arms, ft[1] , and reproductive organs. In Swollen, Complete, Damaged, Birthed within the Damaged; Damaged Birthed, Damaged, Poor, Complete—On the Black Womb’s Altar, On the Black Lady’s Story (2023), dried calabash gourds are mounted on an angled plinth of sapele mahogany; some fractured, some complete, they stand in for womb, breasts, and vagina. Dillon calls out the commodity equivalence slavery drew between human flesh and wooden, and underlines the parallel migrations of Black folks and flora.
Complementing her theoretical rigor with “poethics” (per the artist, borrowing poet Joan Retallack’s time period), Dillon imbues her artworks with linguistic slippages and nonsensical evasions. Dillon’s writing favors elision and repetition, the latter shaping sections of her libretto for Catgut—The Opera, carried out on the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2021. Pointing to pictures in her studio, Dillon defined this linguistic strategy by way of a collection of drawings central to “Gestural Poetics” at Paul Soto Gallery in Los Angeles final yr. Originating when Dillon realized that “spade” was a racial slur, the oil stick drawings repeatedly rehearse the contours of the taking part in card icon, distorting the derogatory expression right into a tree, a protect, or a pair of breasts. Trying over the recurrent symmetries of her drawings, the artist puzzled, “Can I lengthen a definition? Or can I create a brand new definition by way of repetition?”
