From her loft above Times Square in New York, Jane Dickson could spy into the shadows. The city, in the 1970s when she first moved there, was full of dark corners beneath glistening neons, hidden spaces right there in plain sight.
For decades she photographed the strip show signs, the leering, horny men, the glowing cinema boards, and then she transformed them into heavy, murky paintings. This new series is based instead on a bag of negatives of the same streets in the 1980s, but it’s still incredible. There are signs for strip shows, XXX movies, live couple shows and cinemas promising nothing but kung fu hits. Cops prowl the alleyways, men loiter with lecherous intent, families snap awkward holiday photos. This is a lost world of dingy, seedy, sordid entertainment, all captured with grainy, thick, fuzzy gobs of textured colour. Dickson has painted these moments as a documentarian, as a chronicler of a lost city. She’s a modern day Hogarth, freezing moments of dirty society in paint forever.
It resonates especially loudly here, only a few hundred metres from the alleys of Soho which once thrummed with sex and iniquity and endless opportunities for desires to be satiated under the glow of neon light but is now nothing but offices and Prets.
What we’ve gained in safety, sobriety and cleanliness, we’ve lost in danger, fun and freedom. But not in Jane Dickson’s paintings. Here, cities are seedy forever.