Jan Dickey

The above is documentation of studio work completed summer 2023, artworks made during a 4-week residency at the Sam & Adele Golden Foundation, and paintings displayed at My Pet Ram at 48 Hester Street in Manhattan from November through December 2023 (alongside Nanea Lum & Kainoa Gruspe).
 

I explore time and change through painting. Summer 2023 I began tracing the light that passed through the windows of my studio, using its impact on the painting surfaces to guide my compositional decisions. For two years, I had used stencils to project five-pointed stars, at various angles, onto my work. Allowing my studio windows to instead become the aperture for passing light marked a shift from exclusively exploring the five-point star to more broadly opening myself to interactions between matter, light, and time.

 

I like crafting my own paint from ingredients like egg, milk, wax, animal glues, oil, bugs, and plants. All my paints, and the textures they produce, derive from some sort of alchemical mixture. However, after collaborating with the Golden Foundation as a resident in August 2023, I started viewing clear acrylic mediums as yet another earthly substance to experiment with. These acrylic polymers mingle with my natural binders more and more into 2024. 

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