Rhea Dillon
Rhea Dillon works in a wide variety of media, from painting, video and poetry to sculpture, installation and olfaction. Exploring themes of class, race and gender, her work examines and abstracts the ‘rules of representation’ as a device to undermine contemporary Western culture. Continually seeking to question is an important part of Dillon’s practice, specifically questioning what constitutes an ontology of Blackness versus the lived ontic in her conceptually abstract work. She coined the phrase ‘humane afrofuturism’ as a practice of creating equality-led perspectives on how we visualise Black bodies.
Her work has been exhibited at 198 Gallery, London; Somerset House, London; The British Film Institute, London; Mimosa House, London; Blank 100, London; Red Hook Labs, New York; Aperture Gallery, New York; Red Bull Film Festival, Los Angeles; Sanam Archive, Accra Ghana. Having been named as part of Vogue’s New Creatives to Watch 2020 and quoted as The New YBA Class of 2019 for the Evening Standard, there is so much more to see from this artist. She is also an Associate Lecturer at Central Saint Martins, London.
[Image: Rhea Dillon, 'Dishwater and No Images’ at Peak London] @rheadillon
Rhea has been researching AMS, a collection of manuscripts including material on Samuel Coleridge Taylor. For more information about accessing Black Cultural Archives collections, please visit blackculturalarchives.org/collections
In ‘Schema for an overture: Catgut’ Rhea Dillon guides X, both the protagonist and narrator, in writing their overture for a coming soon opera titled Catgut. Rhea will continue to work with the BCA to develop writing her opera in 2021.