Kim Dacres

Deidre's Black History Month Braids

Found tires, wood, screws, and spray paint mounted on wood plinth with black paint, felted wool on industrial rug, found bicycle tire and screws. 43 1/2 × 15 1/2 × 15 1/2 in | 110.5 × 39.4 × 39.4 cm

Charles Moffett is pleased to announce the representation of artist Kim Dacres, a first-generation American sculptor of Jamaican descent, who lives in Harlem and practices her studio work in the Bronx. The artist’s representation follows the celebrated 2023 exhibition, Measure Me in Rotations, from which the gallery placed Dacres’s sculptures in the permanent collections of three museums across the country, including the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; the International African American Museum, Charleston, SC; and ICA Miami. Charles Moffett will next exhibit Dacres’s work in a two-person presentation at Art Basel Miami Beach 2024 - the gallery’s debut year participating in the fair. Prior to pursuing a career as an artist, Dacres worked for nearly a decade as a teacher and principal in New York City public schools. In many ways she approaches her artistic practice as an evolution of teaching — often beginning her sculptures from a specific personal story or untold history, she translates overlooked and unusual materials into captivating new forms, infusing them with a wider, embracing narrative and assertive, worldly presence.
 

Kim Dacres

Ariel's Life in the Sunshine

2023-2024

Found tires, wood, screws, and spray paint mounted in plinth of found tires, pressure treated wood, 4"x4" metal post holder, screws, and spray paint. 66 1/4 × 14 1/4 × 13 in | 168.3 × 36.2 × 33 cm

Dacres uses rubber from recycled tires to create sculptures celebrating the influential forces in her life. An act of sculptural translation, her work embodies the assertive energy and presence of the people, particularly the Black people, women, and queer people, that shape her communities across Harlem and the Bronx — individuals the artist may personally know or encounter, as well as fictional characters, performers, athletes, and musicians that have forged her experience. While drawn initially to the rubber tire material for its uniquely accessible, forgiving, and malleable nature, the artist further mines the material’s metaphorical resonances with her own personal experience and the broader cycle of injustice and oppression inflicted upon her communities in America and across the AfroCaribbean Diaspora. The parallels abound — where others see waste, lacking, and insufficiency Dacres sees boundless possibility; and with that vision comes a profound resiliency, solace, and joy.
 

Kim Dacres

Yvette’s Rage (Rocks Rough and Stuff with Afro Puffs)

2023/2024 

Recycled tires, bicycle parts and chains, pressure treated wood, 4"X4" metal post holder, screws, and spray paint. 56 3/4 × 26 1/2 × 20 in | 144.1 × 67.3 × 50.8 cm

In a process that the artist first began working with as an undergraduate student at Williams College, Dacres collects and disassembles tires of all kinds — car, motorcycle, bicycle, electric skateboard, etc. — from her neighborhood bicycle and auto shops, and then embarks on a complex path of shaping, layering, and connecting the loosened rubber elements to create the singular figurative forms of her work. In more recent years, the artist has integrated pressure treated wood as the internal core, the bones of the sculpture, empowering her to shape increasingly ambitious, individualized, and stylistically nuanced works. Through the alchemical transformation of object into art, Dacres infuses her material with a new, humanistic life force, one reaching far beyond its preordained purpose to tell a new story.
 

Kim Dacres | Photo: Anthony Artis