Torkwase Dyson / Kayode Ojo / Pope.L / Jessica Vaughn. Invisible Man

About

Invisible Man reflects on how bodies use, manipulate and move through their environments, and transforms the gallery into a temporary home for invisible bodies. The objects in this show combine the found, fabricated and refurbished, and change some of the rules of certain fixed systems:

Torkwase Dyson’s large scale almost white-on-white paintings are only seemingly reductive. They operate as a kind of legend with hidden demographic and geographic references, while still maintaining some material anonymity; Pope.L turns water upside down and on its side. You are not permitted to drink from this fountain, or from these glasses. You can look, thirstily, from afar; Kayode Ojo stands a velvet couch on its side, draped with a sequined gown. You can’t sit on it. But someone has left their mark, giving the sense that it is no longer being used but not quite thrown away; Jessica Vaughn’s site-specific wall installation of upholstered Chicago public transportation seats simulate an improvised figuration of a typically predetermined urban common ground.

Invisible Man is titled after Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel:

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me. Like to bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me.