German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel, in his 1903 essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” posited the urban environment as an arena of intense and rapid nervous stimulation resulting from swift, uninterrupted images and impersonal interactions. It brings forth in each inhabitant, “in a thousand individual variants...an organ protecting him against the threatening currents and discrepancies of his external environment which would uproot him.” For many of us, this defense mechanism takes simple forms: we read or listen to headphones on the subway, we don't make eye contact when passing each other on the street, we develop little routines that minimize the day-to-day change we experience. Rotterdam-based Amie Dicke, arriving for the first time in New York in 2001, responded differently to her feelings of alienation. Walking around a foreign environment, unable to find work, having difficulty making friends, and feeling oddly susceptible to the advertisements of big fashion brands that populate the city's streets with outsized ideal beauties, she found consolation in her art practice. In Dicke's own words: “I started to project my loneliness on the city where the most familiar faces were those of the supermodels on the buildings and the magazines.” She picked up an X-acto knife and a pen and began working directly with these images, turning brazenly self-confident women into dark phantom traces of their photo shoot selves.

These works slyly combine the artist's earlier Nauman-esque sculptural casts of negative spaces surrounding her body with her vertically oriented, scroll-like ink drawings of faces connected by webs of thin lines. Dicke retains an interest in presence and absence, solids and voids: in each cutout, large swaths of the models' bodies and of decorative background elements are excised; likewise she uses black ink to selectively cover over colors and other compositional elements. She concentrates on form, and what remains of each fashion image is a network of filigreed lines that calls to mind veins, lace, or wax drippings from devotional candles. Like the earlier sculptures, cast in sugar and icing and prone to decay under the hot lights in a gallery, the cutouts seem affected by gravity, as if they were sagging down the wall. This is especially true of cutouts like Estee (2001), the first cutout to which Dicke applied ink; its contours economically signify the shape of a face but it is one that appears to be melting away. There is a subtle violence in the work, as the dripping lines emanate from the anonymous model's eyes, nostrils, and mouth, perhaps signifying tears and blood; the latter is emphasized by a touch of bright red lipstick left in the composition. The small patch of color on the lips is found in all of Dicke's early cutouts. It is the only trace of beauty among the ruins made of the original images, a life-affirming blush of health among the decay.

These initial, intimately scaled portraits, often titled only with a woman's first name, focused solely on models' faces. But “my work is all about the body,” declared an early artist's statement, and Dicke has recently incorporated the rest of the models' bodies into her compositions. The tentativeness of the first cutouts has been supplanted by self-confidence—almost aggressiveness—both in the poses of the models selected for use and the complexity of the cutting enacted upon them. In these, lips, hair, hands, and feet are left untouched and estranged from the rest of the body, floating alone among sinuous abstract lines. Their incompleteness speaks to the alienation many of us feel when regarding our own bodies, and the isolation of individual parts mimics how we often take a piece-by-piece approach to bridging the discrepancy between how we look and our ideal selves. The analogy is furthered by the linguistic overlap between descriptions of how we alter ourselves and how Dicke alters fashion imagery: cuts, slices, and incisions are made in the flesh and its representation on paper. Dicke carves away the surface of the paper like a surgeon, or like a traditional sculptor finding form within a block of wood or a slab of stone.

The cutouts are most often affixed unframed to the wall. They billow forth slightly, hinting at the third dimension of sculpture as images on the reverse side of each page give the figures a halo of colored shadows. But I would rather think of meaning as the third dimension of Dicke's cutouts: the act of cutting away returns depth to the surface sheen of fashion shoots, as Dicke literally and metaphorically probes beneath the façade of the pictures in an attempt to understand why we place such value in them. To return to Georg Simmel, “from each point on the surface of existence—however closely attached to the surface alone—one may drop a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all the most banal externalities of life finally are connected with the ultimate decisions concerning the meaning and style of life.” The resultant dark undertones—Dicke has recently incorporated references to T.S. Eliot's “The Hollow Men” and Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man into her work—sully the relentless empty exquisiteness of her source images. But, as she applies her knife to more pictures, as the skeins of paper ensnare a wider range of cultural references, and as the skill with which she does all of this increases, Dicke's works on (and of) paper reenter the realm of beauty through the back door. Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Beauty is the symbol of all symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-colored world.” The elegance of these delicate ribbons of paper reveals the fiery-colored world while simultaneously expressing traces of Dicke's quest to find meaning in it.