Kelly Lycan

Kelly Lycan is an installation and photo-based artist who works and resides in Vancouver, BC. Lycan's work investigates the way objects and images are placed and displayed in the world and the cycle of value they go through. Re-purposing and re-contextualizing ordinary things is a consistent part of her practice. She researches the contrast between experience and reproduction translating this through sculpture and photography while referencing collections and methods of display found in museums, institutional gift shops, and department stores. Lycan reinterpret objects using strategies of exhibition, blurring the distinction between content and style, production and mass-consumption, and originals verses copies. These ideas create composites of vernacular collections, art history, contemporary art and design; paradigms collide revealing similarities, influences and failures. She employs photography and sculpture in order to engage them beyond medium specificity into a fluid quality of relations that alter their characteristics; the real becomes replica, representation becomes abstract, and image becomes object.

Lycan studied still photography at Ryerson Polytechnical University, Toronto; received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax; and holds an MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbra and Los Angeles. Her recent solo exhibitions include: More Than Nothing, Burrard Art Foundation, Vancouver, BC, 2016; Little Glow, Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto, ON; Underglow, Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, BC; Autobiography for No One, Simon Fraser University Gallery, Burnaby, BC; Bronze Tinfoil Ball, OR Gallery, Vancouver, BC; White Hot, Gallery TPW, Toronto, ON; and Save Now, CSA Gallery, Vancouver, BC. Lycan was an active member of the artist collective Instant Coffee from 2005 to 2015 and together they have participated in frequent national and international exhibitions. Recent exhibitions with Instant Coffee include Magic Hour, Nikkei Art Gallery, Burnaby, BC; Pink Noise, Kamloops Art Gallery, Kamloops, BC; Bunker Project, Incheon Art Gallery, Incheon, South Korea; Feeling So Much Yet Doing So Little, Western Front, Vancouver, BC; and Disco Fallout Shelter at Subvision Hamburg, Germany and Toronto Sculpture Garden. She is a 2016 recipient of Vancouver's VIVA award.