Jan Dickey

For together through time, Dickey has used paper, flour, water, egg tempera, milk paint, and various animal glues to create sculptural paintings that resemble both traffic cones and the cone bars used to link traffic cones together. Other works on paper adhere directly to the wall, and appear as minimalist references to street signs or directional symbols seen on the roads of Tokyo. While based in Shinagawa for the summer, the artist has taken inspiration from walking the streets of Tokyo and relating human mortality to the nonliving objects used to divide and organize the city. 

Dickey describes this body of work as a means to reflect on the way all the material forms of this world lovingly hold on to one another as they dissolve into oblivion. In together through time, traffic cones and cone bars serve as stand-ins for mortal humans and the connections they form in life. Barred together through time, and slowly worn down by forces on earth, the cones hold onto life and one another. Yet the cones, and their connecting cone bars, are also a means to control the flow of human movement. Throughout the exhibition these barriers prevent us access to portal-like shapes - fashioned after street signs. On closer inspection these barriers are merely feeble obstacles in the path between life and death.