Kim Dickey:

Words Are Leaves

Kim Dickey: Words Are Leaves was a career-long survey of Kim Dickey’s work, featuring sculptures, photography, room-sized installations, and a video. Moving from wry takes on objects of daily use to large-scale groupings of objects, the exhibition demonstrated how the artist challenges basic assumptions about decoration and sculpture. Allowing the decorative to become the signal hallmark of the sculptural object is persistently evident in Dickey’s work: displacing the “object” in favor of ornate surface details enables the work to become both decoration and monumental sculpture, two ideas historically held in opposition to each other. In the end, this exhibition made clear the development of Dickey’s singular approach to art-making that moves from discrete sculpture toward an expanded terrain. Her work boldly transforms the surface into an object and sculpture into an environment.

Kim Dickey was born in 1964 in White Plains, New York. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Alfred University, New York. Her work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts; Everson Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; and the Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii. Dickey has created permanent installations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Colorado; the Danish Ministry of Culture, Denmark; and a commission for the Denver International Airport, Colorado. She lives and works in Boulder, Colorado.