August 9, 2004
Amie Dicke essay for artist's catalog
An essay I wrote about the Dutch artist Amie Dicke's cutouts is now online at BrianSholis.com. Click here to read the full text. Below is an excerpt:
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.