Peep Land: Paintings by Jane Dickson 1983-1993

January 18 - February 20, 1994

Peep Land is an exhibition featuring thirty paintings completed within a ten year period (1983-1993) by New York-based artist Jane Dickson. 

The late Glenn O’Brien, art critic and former member of Andy Warhol’s Factory, characterized these paintings in his essay “Peep Show at the Magnetic Go-Go Pole," written for the Dickson catalogue, as a “post-postmodern” perception of nighttime in Time Square, stating:

“Painters live in such places as Paris or Eastern Long Island because of the light. But certainly Times Square is a place where the light is uniquely “advanced,” where a strange and vivid unnatural spectrum blends the erotic come-on of neon with the cheap fluorescence of all-night donut shops and the penetrating surveillance of the sodium street lamp. In Times Square, Dickson was initiated in the advanced degrees of light and she learned how translucence and opacity operate in a world where little is clear. 

Dickson’s transcendental reportage updates realism with the full-blown post-postmodern spectrum of artificial light. The sun never intrudes on Dickson’s pictures. This is a world of endless night, where black light is the beacon of the black hole of desire. There is no land in the landscape, no tree, no leaf, no flora, no fauna; the only nature visible is flesh. The flesh exists in a world of its own, making a labyrinth of textures and wavelengths. Reality and fantasy merge in a landscape of optical illusion.”