A Voyeur’s View of Life in Times Square

Jane Dickson’s paintings of New York’s Times Square are gritty in both subject and substance. Vertiginous city views coldly illuminated in neon, many have been painted with oilstick on canvases roughed up with something the labels describe as Roll-A-Tex (probably “roll-on-texture”). Imagine colored chalks drawn on pot-holed asphalt, and you’ll have some idea of the paintings’ visceral look.

Dickson’s two dozen paintings and one work on paper comprise a 10-year survey called “Peep Land,” organized by Illinois State University and currently on view at the Long Beach Museum of Art. With her husband, Charlie Ahearn, a filmmaker and video artist, she lived for a dozen years in an apartment several floors above the honky-tonk chaos of West 43rd Street, at the so-called “Crossroads of the World.”

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The activity on the pavement below soon became the subject of her paintings, as it did of Ahearn’s camera. (Several of his videos are being simultaneously screened at the museum in an adjacent gallery, most notably the 39-minute documentary “Doin’ Time in Times Square.”)

“Peep Land,” the title work of Dickson’s show, is an oilstick drawing on black paper, which shows a lone man silhouetted against the garishly lighted facade of a pornographic peep-show theater. His face is dimly illuminated by a burning match lifted to light a cigarette--a quiet gesture that deftly melds a sense of idle public solitude with an icy vision of after-sex relaxation, out there on a city street.

The peep-show doorway that looms behind this shadowy and anonymous figure is shaped like a gigantic keyhole, surmounted by a single, disembodied eye. The prying eye at the keyhole doesn’t just advertise the illicit pleasures to be found inside the establishment; it also becomes a poetic reflection of the artist in her studio window high above the scene and, by extension, of the picture’s viewers getting their eyeful in the comfort of the art museum.

Times Square is a land of peep shows, and Dickson is peeping too. So are we.

Dickson’s paintings have a pronounced voyeuristic quality, which is enhanced by an almost uniform vertical format in evidence throughout the exhibition. Most of the pictures are considerably taller than they are wide, many of them five or six feet in height, resulting in a direct bodily relationship between the painting and a viewer standing before it.

The vertical format makes you scan the picture up-and-down, rather than across in a horizontal sweep, which would be far more common to landscape and genre paintings such as these. This subtle disjunction from the ordinary makes you aware of being connected to but slightly removed from the scene, hovering at a safe distance just above the passing carnival.

Dickson’s is an oddly casual kind of voyeurism, though, one whose payoff is ruminative rather than highly charged. My favorite pictures in the show are three paintings placed at the top of a staircase in the museum’s galleries, in which a shadowy figure is shown to lean out a window or gingerly lift the venetian blinds to see what’s going on outside.

Obviously descriptive of the artist’s own activity, the paintings also mirror us. They put a measure of civility back into an urban situation characterized by atomized harshness.

Dickson’s exhibition also includes a group of three dreamlike paintings whose subject is the demolition derby, that all-American sport in which junker automobiles become jousting steeds for an ethereal, free-form dance of mutual assured destruction.

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In her queasy paintings cars never crash or collide; instead, they slide silently through a hellish and indeterminate space filled with ocherous haze.

Carnival rides are another subject, with their seedy aura of small-town cruelties, as are circular images of oddly muted revelers wearing pointy party hats (perhaps glimpsed while gathering to watch the ball drop on a raucous New Year’s Eve in Times Square).

Pleasure is almost always inflected by a specter of unfulfilled anticipation in Dickson’s work. Hers is a phantom landscape, in which flickers of satisfaction or tranquillity could at any moment be irrevocably taken away.

* Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., (310) 439-2119; through Feb. 18. Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.