Jane Dickson

When Dickson made her artistic debut in the 19808, as a part of the Colab Group, with figurative paintings of Times Square life, her work was often misread. Her depictions of strippers, grasping couples on the sidewalk and crime suspects getting frisked against police cars were emphatically night scenes, drawn with oilstick on blackened linen in a manner reminiscent of black velvet paintings. She also created similar effects with oilstick on paper, as in Jai Alai (1985) in which the silhouetted figures of three men and a policeman, all bathed in artificial yellow light, hover against a bus station wall. Seen as if through the Vaseline-smeared lens of soft-core pornography, these urban scenes were often taken to be a kind of romantic neo-social realism, a cultural anthropology steeped in liberal compassion. In fact, what interested Jane Dickson most about these subjects was the existential street phenomenon of waiting. She was single, in her 208, and she was waiting for her life to begin. Dickson saw herself then as a participant-observer. "I was a witness," she comments in the Bomb interview, "but I wasn't only documenting what was happening to them. It was my experience too."