Jan Dickey: “The High Collapse”
Installation view, Jan Dickey: The High Collapse. Courtesy of the artist and 5-50 Gallery. Photo: Garrett Carroll.
A bird, flying high above fields of wheat, carrots, tulips, and potatoes, would see the tractors, farmers, and furtive rabbits below compressed into one field of vision. We can imagine him seeing crop cycles sped up, quickly revolving from plowing, to planting, to harvesting, to lying fallow, to plowing anew. There is a relativity, a perceived squeezing of space-time, that comes with distance and is shaped by light.
The paintings in Jan Dickey’s The High Collapse at 5-50 Gallery play with time, light, and distance in this way. Contained within them are days, seasons, and other cycles of death and birth, decline and ascendance.
Dickey’s paintings compress time. They are a view from above, a way of taking it all in and surrendering to the evolution of their surfaces. They are relative and all-encompassing. They contain all of their ambiguous transformation within their layers, under their skin. They are topsoil and clay. They are the Earth’s core. They are everything a landscape implies.
In a time of such crumbling, such collapse, it’s hard not to read a sort of hope in the sheer beauty of these paintings, in their generative harnessing of natural cycles to create new forms.
Dickey’s process is one of collaboration with his materials. Applying hand-ground pigments, bound with oil, egg, and rabbit skin glue in often unconventional ways, he plays with the natural cycles of each element to create surfaces that transform improvisationally over time. He often layers muslin over burlap, burlap over canvas, linen over muslin, mimicking layers of soil and sediment. As they are developed, the paintings are laid on their backs like the earth, soaked in, sanded down, and baked in the sun. Cochineal dye and distemper seep through the layers of fabric, and wax is applied to mask off surfaces, lending complicated, landscape-like textures. Dickey leans into this rockiness by layering binders that don’t laminate well, speeding up the drying process, even pushing up from the back of the canvas to loosen layers and encourage cracking.
In this way, he is defying time, but even in this attempt to control, there is an element of surrender. The work mirrors humanity’s relationship to the natural environment—even as we shape nature, its forces rule, taking on an agency of their own. Monuments crumble, flowers blossom, fields dry out. Plants grow over forgotten buildings. Structures are washed away in floods.
The sun rises and sets on these paintings, as on everything else. Jan draws his shapes as the sun shines from a distance through the windows of his studio, chasing the light as it moves and tracing the shadows before they shift. This imbues the paintings with light as a time indicator, implying a continuous beginning and end, construction and collapse. For Dickey, losing time means progressing towards something. High collapse, as such, is generative. One can’t help but think of these paintings as phoenix-like in their construction, constantly preparing their funeral pyres, readying themselves for perpetual rebirth through ashen transformation. At its peelable edges, the paint even takes on this crispy, burnt quality, thinning along the edges like paper held to a fire. In a cheeky nod to this resemblance, Dickey titles one of the paintings Champagne Cinnamon Ash.
Jan Dickey, Champagne Cinnamon Ash (2023). Distemper, natural dyes, sumi, and oil on cotton muslin. 18 x 15 in. Courtesy of the artist and 5-50 Gallery. Photo: Garrett Carroll.
In this way, The High Collapse feels eerily relevant to our time. Institutions crumble around us, structural flaws in monuments are revealed. Light falls, increasing in speed, as time’s cycle reaches the sprint between ceasing and starting anew. Like the sun, like the earth, we are at a breaking point.
Dickey implies this breaking point through his process, flirting with structural crumble and pushing his paintings to the revolving point of apocalypse and genesis. In some of the works, most notably the largest, Blood Horizon, stars seem to fall from the sky into the earth only to bounce back upwards from the bottom. Their five points are squeezed and stretched to nod down, then extend back upwards, reaching again for the sky. The red-pink and brown of blood-soaked soil concentrates in the lower half of the painting, only to wash back into the blues and pale pinks of dawn toward the top.
Jan Dickey, Blood Horizon (2023). Distemper, egg tempera, cochineal dye, and oil on linen over cotton muslin. 72 x 30 in. Courtesy of the artist and 5-50 Gallery. Photo: Garrett Carroll.
Horizon follows a similar cyclical composition, but with an increasingly obfuscated genealogy. A clearly perceptible landscape underlies this painting, fading from blue pink to muddy chartreuse to sandy peach, purple, and deep flat green, but bright red stars peeking out from underneath complicate the work’s sedimentary chronology. One starts to ask oneself: what is lost as the painting is sanded down, bleached, washed, or peeled away? Which of its layers are hidden? Which have ceased to exist? Investigating these paintings, one has to come to terms with not knowing; the origin and evolution of the works, as they take shape, are more or less lost to time. They dissolve from the inside and scramble their layers to form an unreliable archive—much like history, unclearly recorded.
Jan Dickey, Horizon (2023). Distemper, egg, and oil on burlap relined over cotton muslin. 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and 5-50 Gallery. Photo: Garrett Carroll.
But what do we do with the stronger, solid, monumental shapes of Wood Warbler, Lapwing, and Flame-tanager? These works belie less movement, feel more frozen in time. In keeping with the rest of the show, however, this is impossible. In stillness, one starts to notice the transparency of the paint holding these monuments together. Time speeds before our eyes, and suddenly, these solid shapes start to burn to a crisp. What seemed frozen begins to crack.
Wood Warbler is a particularly ambiguous work in this way. Its strong, house-like composition points upward, but is then complicated by a cut corner on the top and bottom edges of its leftmost purple parallelogram. The lavender tint of the shape is already fading into oblivion, overtaken by the strong chartreuse below. The painting is installed near the garage door of the gallery, giving the illusion that, just in the time that it’s been hanging in the show, the sun has bleached the color away. A long tail extending down from the rightmost purple shape leaves its top-heavy section teetering dangerously. There are large swaths of this painting that are almost entirely peeled away to reveal a rusty brown-gray, seemingly the base color of the painting-as-object. But as one looks to the sides of the stretched canvas, the base color is harder to discern—cracked yellow paint gives way to purple-ish pink, gray teal, and even robin’s egg blue.
Jan Dickey, Wood Warbler (2024). Distemper, egg tempera, oil, acrylic, and wax on canvas. 24 x 20 in. Courtesy of the artist and 5-50 Gallery. Photo: Garrett Carroll.
A dialectic emerges here between earth and sky, with monument as the space of mediation between the two. When I think about high collapse, I start to consider the relationship of attaining and building to crashing down. Of rising to falling, like the sun. As these paintings continue their process of compressing time, they embody all stages of these cycles at once. Their relationship to the ground and to the heavens lends them a monumentality of their own.
Our bird, pushing and pushing upward and increasingly blinded by the sun, reaches a point of no return. He looks down, descending into a nosedive.
But just as he nears the ground, and all hope seems to be lost, he begins his ascent again.
The paintings in The High Collapse share more than their titles with the birds, with the horizon, with the ash of fire. They are meditations on embracing decay and surrendering to time’s passage. From the unreliable archives of their surfaces, The High Collapse uncovers new, fertile ground.
Jan Dickey: The High Collapse is on view at 5-50 Gallery from April 19th to June 8th, 2025.