Jane Dickson

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

Karma

549 West 26th Street
New York

Karma presents a conversation with Jane Dickson, Daniel S. 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 publications. 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 the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania; the Director of Creative Research at the Metropolitan New York Library Council; and the 2025 Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. From 2004 to 2022 she served in the Department of Anthropology and the School of Media Studies at The New School in New York City. Her writing and teaching focus on media architectures and information infrastructures. 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; and A City Is Not a Computer.

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Jane Dickson, Out of Here South (Boulay Mi-Voye), 2000-2013. Oil on Astroturf, 73 × 114½ in. (185.42 × 290.83 cm)

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

Karma

7351 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, California

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).