Water can conceal as much as it reveals.

Beneath the surface of the ocean, light changes, distance becomes difficult to measure, sound behaves differently, and familiar systems of orientation begin to disappear. For artist Torkwase Dyson, that altered sensory experience has become a powerful way to reconsider how humans inhabit, construct, and remember space.

At Pace Gallery’s New York location, Seeing in Blue presents a new cycle of paintings shaped by Dyson’s experiences as a deep-sea diver. On view from September 11 through October 24, 2026, the exhibition brings the artist’s longstanding investigations of ecology, infrastructure, Black geography, and built environments into an intimate new body of work.

Rather than simply depicting underwater landscapes, Dyson asks viewers to consider what it means to perceive the world through water.

Painting From the Depths

The paintings in Seeing in Blue emerge from more than ten years of swimming and diving around the world.

Dyson approaches diving not simply as recreation or research, but as an embodied method of witnessing. Pressure, buoyancy, breath, density, navigation, and changing light all become part of the artist’s visual vocabulary. Her experiences underwater are translated through paintings that function less as representations of specific places than as records of altered perception.

The exhibition’s title is therefore significant.

Seeing in Blue is not necessarily about what the artist literally sees beneath the surface. The works are described by Pace as apertures that allow viewers to experience how Dyson sees.

That distinction moves the paintings away from conventional landscape.

The ocean becomes a condition of perception.

From Ocean to Infrastructure

Dyson’s relationship with water has never been purely aesthetic.

Her broader practice investigates the connections between ecology, architecture, infrastructure, and the history and future of Black spatial liberation. In Seeing in Blue, those concerns move into an oceanic environment where natural systems and human-made structures increasingly overlap.

Beneath the ocean surface are remnants and extensions of human infrastructure: industrial equipment, drilling structures, military installations, artificial reefs, surveillance systems, and the remains of built environments.

These objects do not necessarily remain separate from nature.

Over time, they become absorbed into underwater ecosystems.

Dyson’s paintings emerge from this complicated territory between the natural and constructed worlds.

The ocean is simultaneously a living environment and a record of human intervention.

The “Boundless State Change of Water”

At the center of Dyson’s thinking is what she calls the “boundless state change of water.”

The phrase captures something essential about the exhibition.

Water does not have a fixed form. It changes according to temperature, pressure, gravity, environment, and movement. It can be liquid, vapor, ice, mist, current, wave, or atmosphere.

For Dyson, that instability becomes a model for thinking about perception and transformation.

The paintings similarly refuse a completely fixed visual state.

Atmospheric washes coexist with sharply constructed geometric elements. Accidental pools of color meet carefully positioned lines, shapes, hardware, and strings.

The works are built through both surrender and control.

Chance Meets Construction

Dyson begins her paintings on the floor, applying translucent washes of color that pool and layer across the canvas.

The initial marks are partly governed by the behavior of the material itself.

Color spreads.

Liquid gathers.

Edges form unpredictably.

From there, Dyson introduces a more deliberate language of geometry and construction. She develops curving forms through drawing and shaped wooden panels, as well as strings and hardware fixtures. The tension between accidental marks and carefully constructed forms becomes one of the defining characteristics of the series.

This process is important because it mirrors the artist’s understanding of water itself.

There is a system, but there is also unpredictability.

There is structure, but there is movement.

There is intention, but there is also surrender to material forces.

The paintings hold those conditions simultaneously.

Blue as an Experience

Dyson is known for working with dark palettes, often creating dramatic relationships between deep fields of color and brighter marks.

In Seeing in Blue, aquatic tones move to the foreground.

The blues are not simply decorative.

They suggest depth, atmosphere, distance, immersion, and the optical transformations that occur underwater.

In Interbeing Blue (2026), for example, titanium white intensifies the dominant blue tones, while dark green and rust-red introduce counterpoints across the composition.

The effect is neither purely serene nor purely abstract.

The paintings can evoke the beauty of underwater vision while simultaneously suggesting something more precarious.

The ocean becomes beautiful, but its beauty is inseparable from vulnerability.

Beauty and Devastation

That tension is central to Dyson’s project.

The ocean can be extraordinary to witness, but it is also a site of extraction, military activity, surveillance, ecological damage, and climate vulnerability.

Dyson refuses to separate these realities.

Her paintings are therefore not straightforward celebrations of the sea.

They hold beauty and devastation together.

The result is an image of nature that is neither untouched nor passive.

The ocean contains histories.

It contains infrastructure.

It contains political relationships.

It contains memory.

And it contains evidence of the ways human systems have transformed the planet.

The Body Beneath the Surface

Dyson’s interest in water is also deeply connected to the body.

Diving changes the physical relationship between person and environment. Breath becomes a conscious act. Movement becomes slower. Buoyancy alters orientation. Pressure becomes perceptible.

These sensations inform the paintings.

The viewer encounters geometric shapes and atmospheric color, but beneath the abstraction is a bodily experience of navigation.

This is part of what makes Dyson’s work distinct from abstraction understood purely as formal composition.

Her forms are connected to lived spatial experience.

A curve can suggest movement.

A void can become a passage.

A line can function like a diagram.

A field of blue can become a spatial condition rather than simply a color.

From Memory to Painting

Dyson’s research materials for the series include haptic memories, diagrammatic drawings, engineering notes, photographs, journal entries, and process poems created during her explorations.

That combination of technical and poetic material is revealing.

Engineering notes belong to systems.

Poems belong to sensation.

Photographs document.

Memory transforms.

Dyson brings these different forms of knowledge together in the paintings.

The resulting works are neither illustrations of her research nor purely spontaneous abstractions. They are distilled from accumulated experience.

The studio becomes a place where underwater encounters can be reconstructed through paint, line, hardware, wood, and string.

A Broader Practice of Spatial Liberation

Seeing in Blue also extends Dyson’s longstanding engagement with Black geography and spatial liberation.

Her practice examines how space is perceived and negotiated, particularly by Black and Brown bodies, while connecting those questions to ecology, architecture, and infrastructure. Pace describes Dyson as an artist whose work explores the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture.

Within Seeing in Blue, water expands that inquiry.

The ocean is often imagined as an open, borderless space.

But it is also heavily mapped, regulated, militarized, extracted from, and traversed by infrastructure.

The apparent openness of the sea therefore conceals complex systems of power.

Dyson’s paintings make those contradictions perceptible without reducing them to literal diagrams.

Beyond the Gallery Wall

The exhibition is part of a particularly active period for Dyson.

In 2026, her work also appears at the Carnegie Museum of Art, where her animation Tomorrow was Yesterday was created for the 59th Carnegie International, and at the Venice Biennale, where her large-scale multimedia installation Tougaloo is presented as part of the 61st International Art Exhibition.

Those projects reinforce the breadth of her current investigations.

Across painting, installation, animation, and other media, Dyson continues to examine how bodies occupy environments and how environments carry histories.

Seeing in Blue brings those questions into a concentrated painterly form.

The Ocean as an Aperture

The most compelling aspect of Seeing in Blue may be the way Dyson transforms the ocean from a subject into a method.

The paintings do not ask viewers simply to imagine being underwater.

They ask us to reconsider what seeing means when familiar systems of perception are disrupted.

What happens when distance becomes fluid?

What happens when architecture exists beneath the sea?

What happens when natural and artificial environments become impossible to separate?

And what kinds of memories emerge when the body encounters a space it cannot fully control?

Dyson does not resolve these questions.

Instead, she creates visual spaces in which they can remain open.

Her blues become atmospheric rather than descriptive. Her geometric forms become navigational rather than merely formal. Her materials retain traces of both accident and intention.

At Pace Gallery, the ocean is therefore not presented as an escape from the world.

It is a way of seeing the world more clearly.

Seeing in Blue remains on view at Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, through October 24, 2026.

In Dyson’s hands, blue becomes more than a color.

It becomes a space between memory and matter, beauty and devastation, nature and infrastructure—and a reminder that the deepest forms of seeing may require us to change the way we understand where we are.