COUNTER
ms. z tye
ms. z tye
COUNTER
ms. z tye
September 19 - November 2, 2025
Opening reception and performance on September 19, 6 to 8 pm
ms. z tye (b. Lakeland, FL) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice unfolds through topographical investigations in performance, sculpture, and scripture. Summoning her work through what she calls “ancestral praise,” tye’s practice transcends the present realm, engaging with the known, the unknown, and the longed-for. Emotional yet somatic, patient yet practical, she leans—literally and figuratively—into excavating society’s slippery relationships to grief, obedience, and piety
In her new body of work Counter, staged at OCDChinatown, tye advances her investigations of time in a linear sense. Inspired by the notion of being “clockable”—a rubric for passing as a trans woman—tye replaces the external gaze with analog clocks. In troubling the ways transition is scrutinized, she questions the operating principles of patience and self-softening in the pursuit of one’s manifestation of self.
"I often wonder about the ways in which time shapes identity, and how the subconscious memory is at play in life,”
shares tye. “This installation is a snapshot and attempt to retrograde thought processes around linear time, with
hopes to arrive on a plane where past, present, and future collide."
Counter is a time-based installation featuring three new films by the artist. Each, twenty minutes in length, plays in succession and on a loop. Within these vignettes, tye invites audiences into diaristic self-portraits that explore three key themes of the exhibition: Tasking purification rituals inspired by religious notions of cleansing and godliness; Relationships and the lessons forged through intimacy with others and space; and finally, Reaping the Benefits—an amalgamation of these inquiries.
Together, these self-portrait diaries trace a laborious yet deeply worthwhile meditation on the ephemeral nature of
time and the commitments of ritual and communion. True to tye’s signature playfulness and mischief, the exhibition
space is punctuated by what she calls “ruptures”—unexpected interventions that expand and complicate the very
dimensions of time.
ms. z tye’s most recent exploration of ancestral lineage culminated in a performance entitled The Unsinkable, staged
first at The Kitchen (2024) and later at The Museum of Modern Art (2025). Set within a mutable, stage-inspired
installation, tye opens a portal to welcome the ascension of her familial matriarch, Deloris Bell—affectionately known
as Granny Glen. Guided by her grandmother, tye enacts household labor, illuminating the overlooked, often invisible
work of women in the home. At once a lesson and a warning, Granny Glen’s phantasmagoric body guides and
teaches the artist about the rules of the house and the codes of womanhood. With audience participation folded into
the work, Granny Glen’s labor is carried out democratically by both tye and her witnesses, breaking the fourth wall.
This surrender calls for the relief historically denied to Black women of past generations and to their trans
descendants.