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There’s a kind of magic that happens when an artist lets you in before the work is finished. Not just the final, polished pieces — but the mess, the doubt, the small quiet breakthroughs. For the past three months, Allie Regan Dickerson has been doing exactly that inside the walls at the Fort Works Art space at 2100 Montgomery Street. No velvet rope, no mystery. Just an open studio, a slow burn, and a body of work built in real-time, with the world watching. Now, the hush of that process gives way to something more complete — “This Is How We Remember,” Dickerson’s debut solo exhibition.
The show, presented by Gallery of Dreams in collaboration with Fort Works Art, opens April 26 with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. It runs through May 10. But don’t be fooled by the soft lighting or clean white walls. This isn’t a polished product. It’s the trace of something lived — and still living.
Dickerson’s residency came with support from The Arts Fund of the North Texas Community Foundation: a $7,500 cash award, materials stipend, and a working studio embedded inside the gallery But what she built was more than a body of work. It was a rhythm—a way of showing up every day and turning memory into something visible.
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Visitors watched it happen. In real time. No curtain, no mystique — just the hum of linen being stitched, oil being pulled across canvas, hands moving through something tender and unresolved. Her process wasn’t cloistered away; it was right there with you, a kind of open-ended conversation between artist and audience. Not performance — presence.
The finished work — eight new mixed-media pieces — looks deceptively spare: oil, collage, and embroidery on linen. But don’t mistake restraint for simplicity. These works breathe. They hold tension. They mourn. Oil obscures and reveals. Thread doesn’t decorate — it binds. Paper slips in like memory: fragile, necessary, never fully intact.
The work speaks softly, but it hits hard.
At the core of it all is a dialogue with the writing of Martín Prechtel, whose reflections on grief in the Mayan Tzutujil tradition suggest that mourning is praise in disguise, that to grieve is to keep something alive. Dickerson doesn’t illustrate that idea — she enacts it. Her process becomes a ritual. Her surfaces become altars.
What remains on the canvas is incomplete by design. There are ghosts in these layers. Traces of what’s been worked and reworked. The pieces don’t seek resolution — they resist it. They hold space instead. And in doing so, they echo something we don’t often say out loud: remembering is a form of work. It’s labor. It’s love.
Jurors Benito Huerta and Letitia Huckaby — artists, curators, and quiet giants of the DFW art scene — saw the depth in Dickerson’s proposal early on. Emotional clarity without spectacle. They knew what they were looking at wasn’t a performance of grief but the thing itself.
Lauren Saba, director of Gallery of Dreams, put it simply: “You live with someone’s workday for months. You share space. You see things evolve. And that kind of presence changes how we experience art.” That presence, that shared hum, lingers in every piece.
“This Is How We Remember” doesn’t give you answers. It doesn’t offer comfort in the usual way. But if you let it, it will offer you something better: a moment to feel the weight of memory — and to carry it, not alone, but together.
And on April 26, you too can step into the hush. Stand with the work. Stand with the artist. And listen — not for noise, but for what remains.
