Jane Dickson

Jane Dickson is known for her paintings of America's nocturnal underbelly. She has painted Times Square peepshows, carnivals, burlesques, and recession-era casinos, revealing a sense of bleakness and alienation underneath such glitzy spectacles. One of her recurring subjects is the open road, a quintessential American trope that is synonymous with the promise of good times, adventure, and self-discovery. In Dickson's grey and gritty highway paintings, however, the journey is long and arduous, and the destination seems permanently deferred. In this regard, Dickson has been compared to Caravaggio and Hopper, painters who explored the margins of culture for its mystery and dark beauty. While she looks at society with the observant eye of a social realist, Dickson is also interested in experimenting with different media, textures, and techniques. She often explores the aesthetic possibilities of unusual surfaces, painting on Astroturf, sandpaper, vinyl, and carpet. Solo exhibitions of Dickson's work have been shown at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.