Tony Lewis: Abstract Slavery brings together three interrelated bodies of work — Word Search drawings, Gregg Shorthand compositions, and White Drawings — unified by an investigation of the Atlantic slave trade through drawing's material and conceptual possibilities. Large-scale word search grids organize names, places, and financial instruments of the slave trade into diagrammatic form; shorthand compositions abstract specific words into gestural marks that encode language for those who can read them; White Drawings veil frantic graphite marks beneath white pencil, leaving the underlying traces partially visible. Lewis treats the slave trade as "one of the greatest examples of abstraction" — too vast and incompletely documented for fixed representation.
