Author: Zoe Zheng

In the basement of 79 Leonard Street, Jan Dickey’s paintings arrive as an eruption of color, as luminous and insistent as stars against a night sky. For Dickey, who grew up on a U.S. military base in Germany, the star was never a neutral emblem; it was a reminder of home. Dickey writes, in his artist statement, that he resists fixing the star to a single metaphor and chose it for its “open-endedness” and ability to “spark a highly specific range of symbolism and feelings.” In Compression, his current solo exhibition at D.D.D.D., Dickey subjects the star’s familiar geometry to processes of fragmentation, displacement, and recombination, testing how a single form can evoke disparate meanings as its material and pictorial contexts shift. His paintings thus become a kind of map, charting nostalgia, geography, and history across their tactile surfaces.