I Can't Breathe (Water Table)

Torkwase Dyson’s work is informed by geometry, architecture, and abstraction. She is known for creating art that explores how people of color have, and continue to negotiate, spatial order. I Can’t Breathe refers to the phrase desperately uttered 11 times by Eric Garner while held in a prohibited chokehold by police officer Daniel Pantaleo until Garner fell unconscious and eventually died. Even though the incident was captured on video and officially deemed a homicide, Pantaleo was not indicted.

Part of Dyson’s Water Table series, I Can’t Breathe was exhibited in her 2018 solo exhibition, Dear Henry. The exhibition was created as a visually symbolic letter/homage to Henry “Box” Brown, an enslaved African American who escaped to freedom by shipping himself to Philadelphia in 1849.

An acrylic painting on cotton canvas with a grey background. Centrally depicted three distinct shapes created with various brushstrokes. On each side of the canvas is a bright cloudy white cube. Bright and wide brushstrokes of red and white impasto feature strongly at the top middle and right of the canvas, while the same white and red impasto features minimally at the top and bottom of the canvas. The painting was executed primarily in thin, horizontal washes, which resulted in the layering of numerous vertical drips. Occasional passages of thick impasto are present throughout.