August 29, 2025
The first, immediately noticeable achievement in Jane Dickson’s exhibition “Wonder Wheel” is the delicate balance between texture, color and symmetry. The show features paintings made between 2004 and 2025, and it’s a technically virtuosic panorama of the enchantment of fairgrounds, with a focus on the Feast of San Gennaro and Coney Island.
Dark and gritty, emulating the nature of fairs where there’s always too much going on, the paintings here bounce across different views of amusement parks. In “Giglio Fest Little Girls,” a group of girls are huddled in front of a midway while a policeman watches, and in “Baroque Chairoplane” a swing ride in motion shows multiple figures (all looking like a repetition of a single person) in the air and on the ground.
Dickson uses unusual materials, like AstroTurf, sandpaper, vinyl and carpet, among others, as her canvases. These materials already possess their own qualities, so she can create images with surfaces close to the emotion of what she intends to depict.
In “Wonder Wheel,” she works with linen and oil sticks (pigments and oil compressed into crayon-like implements), which, when dry, produce grainy hues. The paintings that emerge look like tinted glass on a rainy night, spurring a memory in the viewer.
Yet Dickson’s true genius is in her consideration of play as an activity to be taken seriously. What seems mindless can, when viewed with a third eye, constitute some of life’s most memorable moments, teaching us how important it is to manufacture amusement.
