Rose Dickson uses shape and pattern to understand relationships of touch, unity, boundaries, overlap, tension, and violence. Employing a system of archetypal forms throughout her work, Dickson is engaged in a speculative alchemy using a range of media including paint, cast metal, wax, and ceramic that explore the qualities inherent in each form and the essential, transformative relationships they create when brought together. Night Vision, Dickson’s exhibition at Adams and Ollman and organized with Melanie Flood Projects, will include new two and three dimensional works. 

Dickson’s work focuses on process to reveal a proto language of emotional connectedness. Her abstract forms, simultaneously archetypal and futurist, share characteristics with the body, tools and ornament. In a series of new wax paintings, Dickson reveals parts of a hidden or forgotten order. Starting with flashe on panel that is then covered in thick layers of beeswax obscuring the pattern or image, Dickson slowly carves back into the panel, rediscovering parts of her original painting. In a near archaeology-like process, Dickson both reveals information and creates mysteries, alternately exposing and obscuring imagery and narratives in a process of discovery. Also on view will be a series of cast aluminum sculptures that began as subconscious finger drawings or tracings in sand. The resulting forms are reminiscent of ant tunnels, fossils, text, or spells. Similarly, images on glass set in irregular ceramic frames are coaxed into being through a process of drawing and redrawing using silver nitrate. Reflecting back onto us are partial, ghostly spirit reflections that feel as if they are in flux— simultaneously appearing or disappearing. 

Rose Dickson (b. 1989, Portland, OR; lives and works  in Chicago, IL) received her BFA from the Rhode  Island School of Design in 2012 and MFA from the  School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2021. Dickson  lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. Dickson has been  an artist in residence at MacDowell in Peterborough,  NH; Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, IL; and  Organhaus Art Space in Chongqing, China.