Grief as Structure, Memory as Material

There’s something undeniably brave, and refreshingly unflashy, about Allie Regan Dickerson’s new body of work at Fort Works Art. This is How We Remember, presented in collaboration with Gallery of Dreams, escapes posturing. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t even conclude. Instead, it breathes. It lingers. That’s the whole point. 

The exhibition, which marks the end of Dickerson’s three-month residency at the gallery, offers eight mixed-media works that balance oil, paper, and thread. These are stitched paintings, yes, but to reduce them to technique misses the point. They are built through a process that mirrors the emotional scaffolding of memory: layered, fragile, occasionally broken, but always repaired with intention, praise even. 

Unlike much of the art circulating in the post-pandemic regional circuit, Dickerson’s work resists catharsis. It does not perform grief. It studies it. Her references to Martín Prechtel and the Mayan understanding of mourning as praise give her project a kind of ethical ballast. And it’s this framework that saves the work from solipsism. These are not autobiographical gestures masquerading as universality; they are deeply personal investigations offered, with care, to the viewer.

The materials are modest, linen, oil, thread but their interaction is anything but timid. Paint is not used to render a memory. Collaged paper feels like a stand-in for both the archival and the ephemeral. And embroidery, long sidelined as mere craft, becomes here a mark of insistence slow, deliberate, intimate.

The structure of the residency itself, a public-facing studio embedded in the gallery, only strengthens the work’s quiet generosity. Dickerson did not retreat from the world to make these paintings; she stayed inside it. Visitors could watch her build, unbuild, and rebuild. They witnessed the labor, the doubt, the small decisions that accumulate into something whole.

This openness makes the exhibition feel like an aperture. The works don’t seek resolution; they ask for witness. There is no grand narrative here, no final image to pin meaning on. But there is a profound understanding that remembering—true remembering—is a verb. It is ongoing, embodied, and always a little bit incomplete. There is much contemporary art that aims for spectacle and less that risks intimacy. Dickerson, wisely, chooses the latter. The result is a show that may be quiet, but it won’t be easily forgotten.