(GHENT, N.Y.) – Artist Jane Dickson will give a talk in the Visitors Center Gallery at Omi International Arts Center (1405 Country Route 22) on Sunday, November 10, 2013, at 2pm. Dickson’s current exhibit, Out of Here: Paintings 1999-2013 – five large-scale oil paintings on AstroTurf inspired by her travels in the Hudson Valley – has recently been extended through December 15, 2013.

Utilizing a cinematic depth of field, along with a heightened palette, distant perspective and low horizon to emphasize the immensity of sky, Dickson’s Out of Here paintings manifest existential melancholy, as well as a sense of quiet solitude. Free of the rigors of actual highway driving, they impart to the viewer a feeling of surreal detachment.

Windshield-framed highways, desolate strip malls, gaudy carnivals and dusty demolition derbies have all found their way through Jane Dickson’s paintings into the canon of American art. Working with a range of industrial materials from sandpaper to AstroTurf, Dickson has brought gritty illumination to the contemporary American landscape.

After studying at Harvard and the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Jane Dickson moved to New York City, where she was part of the politically charged 1980s scene of artists working at the intersection of street art, hip hop, film, and installation. She was a member of the influential artist collectives Colab (Collaborative Projects) and Fashion Moda in the South Bronx.

Dickson’s work – the subject of a 1994 traveling museum retrospective, a 1996 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris, and several solo exhibitions at Marlborough Gallery, New York – is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Dickson has won awards from the NEA, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Illinois State Council on the Arts, among others. Her work has been featured in hundreds of publications including the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, and textbooks including the 4th edition of Prentice Hall’s Art in Culture and Princeton Press’ New York Nocturne.

Omi International Arts Center is a not-for-profit arts organization with residency programs for international visual artists, writers, translators, musicians and dancers. The 300 acre campus is also the site for The Fields Sculpture Park, a public exhibition space with nearly 80 contemporary sculptures; Architecture Omi, exploring the intersection of architecture, art and landscape; and Education Omi, an arts education programs for children. Omi seeks to foster an environment of creative exploration and exchange, professional opportunity and exposure, and a stylistically and culturally diverse community for creative artists from around the world. Through our programs and resulting public events – including our Residency Programs, The Fields Sculpture Park, Architecture Omi, and Education Omi – Omi contributes to the vibrant culture of the Northeast region.