In the studio compartment of Rhea Dillon at Whitney Independent Research Project (ISP), the artist and writer quietly talked about the preparations for three exhibitions, separated for weeks in the summer: her ISP group exhibition; a solo exhibition by Heidelberger Kunstverein; and a stall in the Basel Swiss art section. The ISP is known for its Marxist-leaning, theoretically rich workshops, and is perfect for the 29-year-old artist who temporarily transplanted from south London. Her work has been involved in Canon of Black and Caribbean historians, novelists and poets, including Kamau Brathwaite, Beverley Bryan, June Jordan, and Sylvia Wynter.
The artist, a second-generation British citizen in Jamaica, often draws inspiration from letters to the Caribbean and criticizes the socio-political ceiling inherited as a circulating identity. Sculptures, e.g. Caribbean bone bank (2022) – published last year in “tituba, qui pour nousprotéger?”. (Tituba, who protected us?) The work shows a mahogany cabinet that reverberates the inadequate cabinet owned by the artist’s grandmother, leaning backwards and seems to float like a boat on the gallery floor. Inside, items that were cut into crystal tea serving (for the “Queen Comes”) hovered at the top behind the mirror.
Dillon often makes such sculptures, making visceral portraits of post-colonial black experiences from everyday objects, symbols and languages. “I think about land very much now, opposite to geography or trajectory,” said Dillon, reflecting on the territorial politics of her work, “and ” American anthropologist Vanessa Agard-Jones.
Dillon’s 2024 exhibition “A Changable Terrain” at Tate Britain bridges the bodies and their diaspora through fauna. She introduces a fragmented black woman Hands, feet[1] and reproductive organs. exist Swelling, whole, broken, born in broken; in the story of black women, broken, broken, insufficient, whole (2023), dry calabash gourds are mounted on the tilted base of Sapele Mahogany; some are fractured, some are monolithic, and they stand on the uterus, breasts and vagina. Dillon summoned the commodities equivalents that slavery drew between human flesh and wood, and emphasized the parallel migration of black and plant life.
Dillon supplements her theoretical rigor (borrowing the term “Poet Joan Retallack”) by borrowing the term “Poet Joan Retallack” to fill her artwork with linguistic slippage and ridiculous escape. Dillon catgut-operaDillon performed at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2021. Dillon explained this linguistic approach last year in a series of drawings at the Center for Gesture Poetics in Paul Soto’s gallery in Los Angeles. Originally, when Dillon learned that “spades” were racial filth, the oil pole painting repeatedly rehearsed the outlines of the card icons, twisting the destructive expression into a tree, shield or pair of breasts. Looking at the repetitive symmetry of her drawings, the artist wondered: “Can I extend a definition? Or can I create a new definition by repeating it?”
