Whitney Biennial 2022:
Quiet as It’s Kept
Apr 6–Oct 16, 2022
Jane Dickson
19
Floor 5
Born 1952 in Chicago, IL
Lives in New York, NY
In these paintings, Jane Dickson considers the shared hopes and aspirations that commercial signs convey both in contemporary suburban spaces and in photographs she took of New York’s Times Square in the 1980s. She lived there when the city was, in her words, “burning, broke, and dangerous.” Both groups of paintings, the suburban and the urban, consider locations that are frequently overlooked or stereotyped. Dickson’s careful depictions suggest that a certain violence comes with making generalizations—in the writing off of those who lead their lives in areas that are frequently ignored or dismissed.
Describing the subjects, themes, and places she embraces in her work, Dickson has noted: “I chose to be a witness to my time, not to document its grand moments but to capture the small telling ones, the overlooked everyday things that define a time and place. . . . Everyone lives in a double helix of then and now, new experience entwining with past. Now is mostly unrecognizable as it’s unfolding.”
Save Time, 2020
Jane Dickson, Save Time, 2020. Oil stick on linen, 62 × 72 in. (157.5 × 182.9 cm). Collection of the artist. Photograph by Paul Hodara
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Jane Dickson, 99¢ Dreams
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Narrator: Jane Dickson based some of these paintings on photographs she had taken of Times Square during the 1980s.
Jane Dickson: I found bags and bags of negatives that I had not really looked at since I shot them. And once I started looking at them, I would remember that experience and go, I meant to do more with this. And actually, even though it’s forty years ago, you know, we don’t have amnesia. History is important. And these were done in the eighties. This was a different pandemic, but it was a pandemic. And it has things to say to this moment.
I decided I wanted to be a witness of my time and a witness not of the heroic moments. I feel like I’m more able to offer some fresh insights into the small moments and the overlooked, very everyday things that are such background that nobody thinks about it, you know, as you’re living it.
Narrator: In other paintings on view here, Dickson focused on the suburbs.
Jane Dickson: God knows they’re lonely in a different way, but profoundly lonely. One of my subjects is: how do spaces make you feel?
You don’t maybe think about it, but this is what you’re dealing with every day, are these non-places that are strictly designed for someone’s economic advantage. And we’re all trying to figure out how to wend our way through these worlds.