Kelley made a career of reading the “lower” regions of American culture—comic strips, suburbia, punk music, consumerism—through the psychoanalytic concepts of repression, regression, and transference. The resulting drawings, sculptures, and installations are often evocative, disturbing, and deeply funny.

The project Plato’s Cave, Rothko’s Chapel, Lincoln’s Profile comprises performances, music, installations, and drawings; its title refers to the well-known allegory of the cave in Plato’s Republic, putting it in association with the Texas chapel designed by the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, and President Abraham Lincoln’s familiar facial profile, which is featured on the US penny. Kelley crossed Plato’s parable of appearance and reality with questions of lightness and darkness, interiority and exteriority, representation and simulation, the ideal and the contingent.

Exploring, part of this larger project, shows the inside of a cave, dense with suggestively shaped stalagmites and stalactites; to explore this space, we are told, we must first stoop and then crawl like a worm. In its conflation of interior exploration and regression, the drawing ponders the opposition between the desire to know and the impulse to refuse knowledge, which Kelley acknowledged as the crux of his art: “I saw that certain themes came back again and again in my work. There’s sort of an ur-group of information that I was suppressing . . . standardized kinds of repressed things in the culture—embarrassing things, like sexual dysfunction and the scatological.”