”The sky sags into the earth and the present collapses into the past.” -Jan Dickey, Spring 2025
5-50 Gallery is pleased to present The High Collapse, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Jan Dickey. The show will be on view from April 19th - June 8th, 2025, with an opening reception on April 19th from 4-7pm.
Rooted in the material languages of decay and excavation, Dickey’s work explores the rhythms of collapse as both a structural event and a temporal phenomenon. Each painting in The High Collapse bears the marks of time—compressed, cracked, and sanded back to reveal sedimentary layers of pigment and natural binder.
Working with a unique blend of hand-ground pigments and materials like egg, oil, and rabbit skin glue, Dickey constructs complex surfaces that are both deeply textured and visually elusive. His process, an evolving dialogue with paint itself, mirrors the cycles of erosion and emergence found in nature.
“I have a symbiotic relationship with paint,” Dickey writes. “I arrive at compositions that reveal cracks, peels, and other material movements as expressions of paint's inherent personality. I trace fleeting light shapes as a way to compose—and allow ungovernable mixtures of paint to guide the work.”
Through gestures that alternate between control and surrender, Dickey disrupts composition and authorship, allowing surface phenomena to chart their own course. The resulting works capture a sense of suspended time—where light is fossilized in layers, and collapse becomes a generative, creative force.
Jan Dickey holds an MFA in painting from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a BFA from the University of Delaware. His work has been exhibited internationally in solo and group shows in New York City, Tokyo, Chengdu, Honolulu, and Boston. He has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, and ARTnSHELTER in Tokyo, among others. In August and September 2025, he will be the artist-in-residence at TUR in Riga, Latvia—a meaningful location tied to his family roots. Recent exhibitions include Constellation at the University of Kentucky Medical Center (curated by MARCH gallery), The Generations at Bob’s Gallery, Raw Material at My Pet Ram, and Passing Through at D. D. D. D.. His work has been featured in Art Spiel, Arte Fuse, Two Coats of Paint, and Hawaii Public Radio. Dickey currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, and is a studio resident at Art Cake in Sunset Park through August 2026.
