Opening reception: May 9th | 6 pm–8pm

light sharpened – on the brick wall – cornered – into a - yes – tell me – please illuminate – how do we make sure – to always – see?

These works consider: the labor and process of paying attention, silence, light settling on a window screen, staring at a white ceiling until one really sees it, describing pain, describing joy, a cracked concrete floor walked on daily, the various ways cracks in concrete are sealed up, the intimacy of physical and emotional proximity over time, the sensations of caring for others, the process of listening and receiving, the shifting boundaries between self and others, reciprocity, boundaries that dissolve in times of vulnerability, the reflections of light moving across brick walls and windows, boundaries dissolving between self and space and matter, the feeling of seeing new delineations, repetitive daily tasks that create grounding, the pattern on a blanket, patterns that create structure, waiting, an open door, traversing loss, the sudden blue framed by a window as seen from a low perspective, sensations of attachment, sensations of expanse, and the spaces that surround the body while it moves through time and time moves through the body.

“As” is the word that connects the four titles of these paintings – it’s a word that is defined by what it is in relation to. It can be used to indicate “during the time of being.” It is “used in comparisons to refer to the extent of degree of something,” or “used to indicate by comparison the way that something happens or is done.” And perhaps most appropriately, “used to indicate that something happens during the time when something is taking place.”

-Jessica Dickinson


Altman Siegel is pleased to present Jessica Dickinson’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, titled As: Now. For this exhibition, four new paintings will be exhibited in the larger space, with sequential selections from each painting’s remainder sets installed in adjacent rooms.

Focusing on the sensations of time, light, and matter within shifting philosophical, perceptual and psychological states, Dickinson is interested in how the feeling of time passing can be at once physical, emotional, linguistic, and ephemeral. And through this, how painting proposes an important site of encounter within our contemporary environment of increasing disembodied exchanges.

Dickinson works on three to four paintings concurrently a year, putting each painting through a gradual accumulation of events that draw their direction from a specific period of lived life, where abrupt change is intertwined with minor, daily time. Working with oil paint on a plaster-like ground, these are extensive actions of countering speeds and pressures, from repetitive marking and notching, to aggressive chiseling, sudden removal, or covering. Moving through the works are forms that act as veils, thresholds, obstructions, or openings, abstracted from quotidian structures from everyday life. The fresco like surface creates a weight for the peripheral experience that is the subject of each piece, bringing the intangible into monumental form. Through this prolonged process, a different index of duration is manifested through the “remainders.” These large-scale graphite rubbings are made of the painting’s surface each time it has gone through a significant change, registering and extending a temporal narrative. Where the paintings compress time into chromatic, tactile, and luminous materiality, the remainders are ghost like topographies that imprint the not always visible.

Jessica Dickinson (b.1975) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Solo exhibitions include James Fuentes, New York; David Petersen Gallery, Minneapolis; and Maisterravalbuena, Madrid. Numerous group exhibitions include “New Ruins,” American University Art Museum, Washington D.C.; “Surfacing,” James Harris Gallery, Seattle; “See Sun and Think Shadow,” Gladstone Gallery, New York; “Same But Different,” Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece; “Room by Room: Monographic Presentations from The Faulconer and Rachofsky Collections,” The Warehouse, Dallas; “Jessica Dickinson, Oscar Murillo, Cammie Staros, & Phil Wagner,” Mihai Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles; “Come Through,” Sikkema Jenkins, New York; and “Besides, With, Against, and Yet: Abstraction and The Ready Made Gesture,” The Kitchen, New York.