In New York’s Times Square, value can be measured in watts and lumens. At night, the streets and the people on them are irradiated by colossal video screens, electric signs, and spotlit billboards—desperate pleas for our attention . . . and money. Even during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the sidewalks were mostly empty, the lights remained on, flooding the desolate terrain with advertising. In the late 1970s and early 1980s—when the area was crudely lit by the neon signs and fluorescent marquees of bars, pornographic theaters, and sex shops—Jane Dickson made this nightscape her primary subject. From her perch in the office behind the massive Spectacolor light board at One Times Square, where she worked the graveyard shift, or her loft window around the corner on West Forty-Third Street, Dickson observed the activity below, taking photographs and making sketches that formed the basis of her earliest canvases.
For the recent paintings exhibited across two of Karma’s three East Village galleries, Dickson has been revisiting her decades-old photographs, producing a new body of work that homes in on the inadvertent poetry of commercial signage. A trio of tall, slim paintings of the Empire Theater’s marquee—Kung Fu Hits Horse Cops 2, Empire Always Great, and Rage (all works 2023)—bridge her early and recent representations of Times Square. There are still remnants of passersby: Two threatening cops on horseback trot by a pair of men in furtive conversation, four workers update the sign with new titles, and a solitary man pickets us with a placard that reads REPENT THE END IS NEAR. But the artist’s drastic vantage points and severe cropping foregrounds the words on the marquee, which function as warnings, or even as a form of captioning: HITS hangs above the officers, a neon EMPIRE glimmers like a beacon over the sign-changers on their ladder, and RAGE hovers over the doomsayer. Each scene is suffused with an artificially blue light, which Dickson creates using a washy acrylic flecked with shattered eggshells, heightening the undercurrent of violence.
In other works, Dickson plays with the ambiguity and duplicity of marketing language. What is “promised” by the roadside billboard in Promised Land 2—fittingly displayed in the gallery’s storefront window—is not paradise, but fast cash in exchange for the house you can no longer afford. Bargain, a luminous, seemingly backlit painting on royal-blue felt of a sign festooned with plastic car-lot flags, seems to ask what is gained in any deal, and what, of course, is lost. In Save Time 2, a Laundromat’s orange neon encourages customers to drop and go, but it also reminds us how artists preserve time in pictures.
Dickson regularly applies traditional painting techniques, like chiaroscuro and scumbling, to atypical substrates, including Astroturf, carpet, sandpaper, and vinyl. For some of the works here, she deftly used acrylic on canvas-mounted felt to reproduce softer, diffuse light; for others she deployed oil-stick on linen, often prepared with a black ground, to achieve the flickering radiance of neon. The latter approach is especially evident in Universal Unisex, an after-hours view of a nearly empty hair salon and the most Hopperesque picture in the show. With their texture-derived soft focus and disorienting perspectives, Dickson’s paintings are intoxicating—especially the larger ones. Sizzlin’ Chicken, a hazy rendering on paint-saturated olive-green felt depicting a scene outside a fast-food joint, actually looks drunk.
At times, Dickson’s seductive surfaces belie her subject matter. School Girls shows us that skin-flicks like That’s My Daughter once played on West Forty-Second Street, an area that is now a family destination with its big-box stores, Disney adaptations, and immersive candy shop experiences. The “architecture of distraction,” as the artist called it recently, still predominates. Up Against the Wall, a loose rendering in oil stick of two cops frisking three men—who certainly do not appear to be white—in a subway station is, regrettably, more timeless. Although Dickson first painted this image in 1981, the scene is still painfully familiar: It could be playing out anywhere in the city at any moment. Together, these works suggested how Dickson resists the trappings of nostalgia, even as she revisits old images: by acknowledging that the past is as knotty and difficult as the present, and that neither is more “authentic” than the other.
