Jane Dickson is Times Square. She lived and painted it in a way that changed the perception of the place for the decades to come. Her oil paintings, often oil on Astroturf, seem to define a hazy, romantic and rather moody version of the place, and in her subsequent works throughout the years, creates a sort of dream of what a memory is. Sometimes forgotten is her work on the West Coast, which has been lovingly revived and curated into Are We There Yet?, a new solo show at Karma's Los Angeles location. As the gallery points out, "Best known for illuminating the darker corners of New York’s Times Square, Dickson turned her attention in the mid-1990s to Los Angeles’s sprawling network of highways, an equally contested landscape and site of projected desire."
Her first solo show in Los Angeles in 25 years, featuring paintings on Astroturf made between 1999 and 2024, the idea of a manufactured west with the expansive visuals on the turf is quite striking. Dickson's highways, signage, long empty roads, all seems to point to an idea that freedom can be made to look natural and organic, but that in the sense of America, there is something rather constructed about it. Nature, infrastructure, modernity, open-air, all these dichotomies are in play with Dickson, just as the Times Square works gave a sense of serene quiet, her LA paintings give a sense of quiet isolation. —Evan Pricco
