A Conversation: Jane Dickson and Hamza Walker
at Karma Los Angeles
Saturday, September 21, 4–5 pm

Karma presents a conversation between artist Jane Dickson and Hamza Walker, director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles, on the occasion of Dickson’s exhibition Are We There Yet? at 7351 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, on view from September 19–November 2, 2024.

Jane Dickson (b. 1952, Chicago) makes paintings and drawings that explore the psychogeography of American culture. Dickson’s practice was forged in the crucible of New York’s late-seventies counterculture, where she participated in artist collectives like Fashion Moda, Collaborative Projects Inc., and Group Material. Working figuratively from her own photographic snapshots, especially of New York’s Times Square, where she lived for nearly thirty years, Dickson portrays strip clubs, diners, motels, sex workers, and their seemingly straight-laced foils: suburban homes, driveways, and businessmen. Using oils and acrylic on canvas and linen alongside a range of atypical surfaces such as vinyl, felt, astroturf, and sandpaper, she achieves impressionistic textures that often blur her subjects in hazes of neon and darkness. In her compositions, the tradition of social realist painting collides with postmodern feminist cultural critique, yielding paintings that are simultaneously representational and conceptual. Dickson lives and works in New York.

Hamza Walker is director of LAXART, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining LAXART in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at LAXART include Nikita Gale, Takers (2022); Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press, The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity, Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).

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