Installation

More Than Nothing

Kelly Lycan

November 5th to December 17th, 2016
Burrard Arts Foundation
Vancouver BC

photo documentation by
Dns Ha and Kelly Lycan

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A Light Response

Five artists respond to More Than Nothing: Lucien Durey, Deboarah Edmeades, Justin Patterson, Natalie Purschwitz and Marina Roy

November 26th to December 17th, 2016
Burrard Arts Foundation
Vancouver BC

In More Than Nothing, a new installation work specifically conceived for the BAF after a ten-week residency, Kelly Lycan delves into the aesthetics of museum interiors, architecture, and display models, both past and present. In her research, Lycan photographs and collects images of display systems from museums worldwide. Her findings inventory the many plinths, shelves, and cases built specifically to showcase artworks and artifacts, but that often fade unnoticed into the background. The resulting exhibition stems from this study of museological display practices — subject matter which Lycan has engaged with in exhibitions at, Or Gallery, Presentation House Gallery, and Kamloops Art Gallery.

Referencing her archive of museum spaces and display cases, Lycan loosely recreates shelves and walls using drywall, and house paint in various shades of white — cheap commodities easily available at any hardware store, and common to both building sites and gallery spaces alike. Her use of these ordinary materials — indeed the same materials that make up the interior of BAF itself — refocuses the viewer's gaze on what is typically overlooked as extraneous information. Lycan appends and reconfigures the BAF's architectural and spatial layout with roughly cut and painted drywall placed in direct relationship with the gallery's existing walls. With its anti-monumental aesthetic, More Than Nothing muddles and blurs the boundaries of art and the white cube space of the gallery, seamlessly melding the two.

More Than Nothing encourages the viewer to look at ordinary objects instead of through them. Arguing for a shift towards a new materialism in his essay, "Thing Theory", scholar Bill Brown writes that we can better understand the potency of things by asking what are "the ideological and ideational effects of the material world and of transformations of it," as well as reflecting on "what work [things] perform." In this vein, we can consider how display structures affect how we view artworks and how these structures have shaped exhibition practices. In her drywall fabrications of shelves and gallery walls, Lycan foregrounds their significant function within a history of art, exhibitions, and museum methodologies.

By highlighting the discrete display systems typically used to frame and present objects as art, Lycan bestows these humble structures with their own subtly powerful aura as artworks. In More Than Nothing, display shelves are reborn as minimalist sculpture and abstract painting, compositions and still lifes in themselves. Viewers are asked to imagine these objects' trajectory between various mediums and contexts: from exhibiting artworks in museums, to being photographed, to becoming the key components of a site-specific installation at BAF. How does their associated value shift and evolve as they move from one context to another, from the flatness of a photograph to the three-dimensionality of an installation, from figurative to abstracted content? Finally, Lycan pushes this trajectory full circle by asking local artists Lucien Durey, Deborah Edmeades, Justin Patterson, Natalie Purschwitz, and Marina Roy to respond to her shelf sculptures, where her artworks may well become display systems once again.