Jane Dickson “Hot, Hot, Hot”

Jane Dickson “Hot, Hot, Hot”

Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

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Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project presents Jane Dickson’s Hot, Hot, Hot, a series of rarely seen and moody paintings of Times Square peep shows from the 1980s. Dickson’s history and legacy are rooted in Times Square. She worked and lived there from 1978 to 2008 documenting her daily lived experiences and observations as a young woman. In photos, drawings, and paintings that utilize unconventional industrial and domestic materials as surfaces—including carpet, sandpaper, and black plastic bags—she captured a time and place that was notoriously lawless, squalid, and vibrantly alive.

In her essay for the exhibition catalog, art historian Deborah Frizzell places Dickson as a critical witness and commentator on the effects of mass media on “perception and desire”:

Rooted in the street as a site for public intervention, as a place to seek out alternative stories and ways of being, Dickson works with the existing repertory of cultural imagery and reveals the slippage or difference prompted in the interplay of power and illusion in contemporary America, particularly from a feminist perspective that has been ignored and erased from view. Rather than a smoothly polished verisimilitude or a crafted collage of fragments, Dickson’s rough-cut method often disorients, jars our senses, and doubles the vertigo induced by obliquely angled perspectives or alternatively, flattened peepholes and cubicles.

While the specifics of live peep shows flaunting the broad spectrum of unenhanced bodies accepted in a pre-cosmetic-surgery era are now exotic, and the live peeps are a historic artifact of the pre-internet universe, the underlying dynamics of power and vulnerability and the stark divide between who works and who pays remain as relevant as ever.

Media

• Painting

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