When I ran into Kim Dacres at Art Basel Miami Beach in late 2025, there was a lot of excitement in the direction of her work that would become Lost on a Two Way Street on view now at Charles Moffett Gallery. The first-generation American of Jamaican descent, now based in Harlem, has become known for her signature works involves collecting discarded tires and bicycle parts from New York City streets and transforming them into figurative sculptures. She transforms the tire treads into forms that evoke hairstyles — buns, rows, locs — and crowns the figures with gear-like metal embellishments made from bike chains. The work feels like its containing movement, containing something nearly indestructible, like she's reclaiming something overlooked and making it monumental.
There's a powerful tension between the roughness of the rubber and the elegance of the forms she creates. The rubber is doing a lot of symbolic work. It's the material of roads, of infrastructure, of the systems that move a city — and it's discarded, run over, left on the street. Dacres picks it up and makes it into something regal. That inversion feels like the thesis of the work, and using the medium of the classical bust is key symbolically — a form historically reserved for those deemed worthy of immortality. Dacres is playing with history. She builds monuments from what the road discards — and in doing so, asks what it means to pledge allegiance to a street that was never designed to run both ways. —Evan Pricco
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