A Conversation and Book Launch
with Jane Dickson, Daniel Palmer, and Shannon Mattern
at Karma, New York
Saturday, February 8, 4–6 pm

Karma presents a conversation with Jane Dickson, Daniel Palmer, and Shannon Mattern followed by a book launch and signing.

Jane Dickson 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 in New York.

Daniel S. Palmer is chief curator at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia. Previously he was curator at Public Art Fund, New York, where he organized 20 exhibitions. Prior to this, he served as the Leon Levy Assistant Curator at the Jewish Museum, New York and Curatorial Research Assistant at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Palmer has curated numerous exhibitions independently and has contributed writing to many artist monographs, publications, and journals including ARTnews, The New York Times, Mousse, and Kaleidoscope, among others. He holds a Ph.D. and M.Phil in art history from the CUNY Graduate Center and a B.A. from Rutgers University.

Shannon Mattern is a Professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research at Harvard. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and A City Is Not a Computer, published by Princeton University Press. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal. In addition, she serves as president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions.

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