Roughly Right by Alicia Kelly
108|Contemporary
Through March 21
The floor to ceiling windows at 108|Contemporary allow visitors large gulps of sunlight while inside. That light is an active participant in the current show by Alicia Kelly, Roughly Right, casting shadows that reframe elements of the works on display.
On a recent visit with my art students from Cascia Hall, 108’s executive director Jen Boyd Martin walked our group into the gallery and introduced us to several highlights from the show. Dancing Alone, Together is a large monochromatic work with three snake-like shapes cascading from top to bottom, never touching. Small curved lines are cut from the paper’s surface, revealing spaces behind and in between. I peeked into the darkened openings the way one might sneak a look through blinds, catching a little glimpse of someone else’s private world.
The title shot me back to my high school poetry class, where I stood at the front of the room one day reading a piece I had written with a similar name (Together Alone). I was so nervous I inadvertently skipped over the middle third of my poem, leaving the few classmates following along with raised eyebrows. Those same arched shapes echo throughout Kelly’s work, a reminder of my error carved into memory. This impulse to recognize meaningful forms, especially facial ones, in unrelated patterns is known as pareidolia, a term the artist came to know in her carving process.
As if reading my thoughts, Martin revealed that Dancing Alone, Together contains a mistake. Our noses moved closer toward the glass, scanning the raised shapes to find the artist’s error. Kelly’s disregard for perfection unlocked a new way of viewing her work. Her seemingly perfectly carved patterns were not what we initially thought them to be.
“I’d rather be roughly right than precisely wrong,” a contractor once told the artist. In Kelly’s exhibition statement, she writes that she “emulates this mantra” by “abandoning the weight of perfectionism” for entrance into a meditative state. A process video of Kelly plays by the gallery entrance, showing her deliberate carves into paper made quickly, not precisely, using an X-acto knife as her drawing tool. Her smooth, rhythmic slices make it hard not to get spun into her hypnotic process.
Light passed through the plant-like shapes in her installation hanging nearby, Building Up a Home, casting grey shadows in front of my feet. Softening the hard edges of the gallery, the installation’s thirteen long rectangular strands are suspended from the ceiling. They are made from Tyvek—a synthetic material often used in home construction—and connect to a similar pattern on the wall. Kelly’s deference to building materials is a result of growing up watching her father constantly renovating their old house. Pencil lines are visible on several strands, much like a carpenter’s marks on wood. On another wall, a pattern made from plaster spackling rises above a hand-painted earth-toned paper, adding depth to an otherwise two-dimensional work.
As I walked through the gallery, the installation’s white strands shifted quietly behind me, moving the patterned shadows on the floor. Martin closed the window shades to show how the exhibit shifts without sun. The track lights blew a gale of light through Kelly’s cuts, darkening the shadows and giving them a polished shape. We walked through the show anew, peeking again into the negative spaces created in Kelly’s knife marks, the shadows on the wall coming into focus.
When my students and I returned to our classroom, there was a noticeable ease in the way they approached their projects, a willingness to make mistakes and not know exactly where their work might lead. Perfection was no longer a focus; instead, play took its place. Our visit to Roughly Right was like a permission slip to go where we may not have intended, letting the light lead us places we may not have originally seen.
