Tiger Strikes Asteroid PHL is pleased announce You, me, these walls, and our ghosts, a solo exhibition of new work by Lucas Kelly.

Broadly construed, Kelly’s work is an exploration of memory, its fragility, and its reconstructive nature. His pieces consider the psychological need for linear narrative when replaying scenes from one’s personal history. Likening each access to a memory with the process of opening a jpeg image file, he intuits that a kind of averaging of remembered events or scenes occurs, leaving gaps that our mind fills in to create coherence. Over time, these moments of access deteriorate the accuracy of the memory itself. Thus, although we long to preserve and remember, Kelly appreciates that in our efforts to do so we alter and sometimes damage the fabric of our most treasured recollections. Kelly refers to this process as a beautiful disaster of sentimentality.

Kelly extracts forms, colors, or sensibilities from specific moments in his own autobiography, creating abstracted images and objects that act as surrogates for missing parts of the memory. These abstractions exist in real space and their permanence counteracts the ephemeral nature of their source. Kelly finds personal comfort in the ability of these forms to act as stable surrogates for his memories, but sees them as offerings to viewers for having their own experiences. The formal ambiguity of his pieces affords such varied encounters. Architecture serves as a structural constant within these memories, but our definitions of what places like home, workplace, or nation are is just as malleable as the memories for which they landmark.

You, me, these walls, and our ghosts extends this examination of memory within shared experiences and spaces. Deviating from a focus on the singularity of autobiography, the works here consider the impact of differing lenses. These lenses shift our personal, social, and political perceptions of an instance. Lucas Kelly’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States and throughout Europe. His work has been the subject of multiple solo and group exhibitions, most notably in the survey of abstract painting “The Painted World” at PS1 MoMA. In 2019 Kelly was named as the inaugural artist in residence at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics. A full professor in Visual Arts at Mercer County Community College, Kelly holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts.