What does a city look like the instant you step into it? Before your eyes settle on a face, a building, or a street corner, there’s movement, color, light, and a blur of activity competing for attention.
That fleeting sensation is at the heart of Debbie Likley Pacheco’s “Living in Layers,” on view at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens through September 27th. The Memphis artist’s mixed-media works combine photography, digital manipulation, painting, and wax to create images that hover between recognizable city scenes and abstraction.
Pacheco’s artistic roots stretch back to childhood, when her father taught her to draw and paint at the kitchen table. She later studied art and graphic design at the University of Memphis and worked as an advertising art director before leaving the field about 20 years ago to devote herself to painting full time. Those experiences continue to inform her work: Photography taught her to “see through the camera’s eye,” while graphic design gave her a practical understanding of concepts, deadlines, and the business of making art.
For “Living in Layers,” Pacheco turns her camera toward New York City, photographing pedestrians, architectural details, reflections, graffiti, light, and the constantly shifting relationship between people and their surroundings. She has accumulated thousands of New York photographs over years of visits, using them as raw material for an intentionally unpredictable process.
Pacheco begins by bringing photographs into digital programs such as Photoshop and Procreate, where she combines multiple images with colors and textures. The resulting compositions can contain roughly seven layers before they are printed on fine-art paper. She then paints directly onto the photographs, mounts them on wood panels, and finishes them with thin layers of wax, which add both protection and visual depth.
But the layering is more than a technique. For Pacheco, it reflects the complexity of human experience. Her images aren’t intended to tell one fixed story or present one perspective. Instead, people, buildings, light, and movement overlap, inviting viewers to look closer and discover many stories within the same scene.
Ultimately, Pacheco hopes viewers experience some of the excitement she felt encountering New York — and leave looking more intentionally at the layers of the world around them.
“LIVING IN LAYERS,” Dixon Gallery & Gardens, 4339 Park Ave., Through Sunday, September 27.
