Jan Dickey

5-50 Gallery presents The High Collapse, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jan Dickey.

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"The sky sags into the earth and the present collapses into the past.” -Jan Dickey, Spring 2025

 

Rooted in the material languages of decay and excavation, Dickey’s work explores the rhythms of collapse as both a structural event and a temporal phenomenon. Each painting in The High Collapse bears the marks of time—compressed, cracked, and sanded back to reveal sedimentary layers of pigment and natural binder.

 

Working with a unique blend of hand-ground pigments and materials like egg, oil, and rabbit skin glue, Dickey constructs complex surfaces that are both deeply textured and visually elusive. His process, an evolving dialogue with paint itself, mirrors the cycles of erosion and emergence found in nature.

 

“I have a symbiotic relationship with paint,” Dickey writes. “I arrive at compositions that reveal cracks, peels, and other material movements as expressions of paint's inherent personality. I trace fleeting light shapes as a way to compose—and allow ungovernable mixtures of paint to guide the work.

 

Through gestures that alternate between control and surrender, Dickey disrupts composition and authorship, allowing surface phenomena to chart their own course. The resulting works capture a sense of suspended time—where light is fossilized in layers, and collapse becomes a generative, creative force.