2020: ONE-LINER LA



“Some images ask to be folded or covered, others suggest a line. They have their language.
And I try to understand how they speak to me.” – Amie Dicke.


The exhibition’s title refers to a striking new technique whereby Dicke uses a continuous, meandering incision to slice into aluminum plates bearing composed fashion portraiture. As she follows her line around the immaculate bodies in works such as ONE-LINER III (Holding the Rodeo Image) and ONE-LINER IV (Listen), the artist maps the touch of her hand and eye around the images, then bends new shapes into the metal. “Nothing is really removed, nothing is lost, just opened,” she notes. By adding space where there was none, and creating work that elides the conventions of two- and three-dimensional forms, Dicke continuously distorts and realigns the possibilities of our visual experience. “They are almost a movie in one still,” she says of these intriguing assemblages. 

Many of the works on show in this exhibition feature the edges of a book or page in some way, so context and framing are highly visible throughout. In her HANDLE series, the artist’s hand is literally in the frame, holding an image or partially obscuring it. “To touch is an act of curiosity,” says Dicke. 

Elsewhere, a triptych of ostensibly disparate yet subtly interrelated images from Dicke’s studio archive forms a horizontal assemblage in SMILE/LEAN IN/ELBOW whereas, for works such as 111 SELF SERVICE No 47, Dicke’s intricate abrasions of the printed aluminum plate reveal the very metal which is the carrier of the image.

Despite her mastery of inventive techniques and myriad sources, Dicke says that over and over she’s pleasantly perplexed to spot the resonances that recur in her oeuvre. “Often I think I have a new way of working, but after looking longer at it I see familiar topics, shapes and lines coming through. It’s like an autograph.”