Kelly Lycan is a photo-based installation artist who pulls apart our expectations of the photograph. Like a back door or a sprung leak, her work is both deceptive and expansive. It moves viewers through installations that accentuate the medium’s inherent instability, its material and latent underpinnings, and creases in time. For a 2014 installation, Underglow, she made a full-scale replica of a grainy black-and-white photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz. The original photograph shows the interior of the gallery 291, which operated in New York City between 1905 and 1917 and platformed well-known photographers and avant-garde artists. Making the image three-dimensional and inhabitable, Lycan also vacated it, notably leaving out certain details, like the pictures on the gallery’s walls. She took visitors to the existential center of the image, where we were left to observe its presence and its artifice in the same stroke.
Alfred Stieglitz, installation view of Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence H. White exhibition at gallery 291, New York City, 1906. Reproduction of the photogravure originally published in “Camera Work, No. 14,” 1906.
Kelly Lycan, Underglow (installation view), 2014, Courtesy the artist and the Polygon Gallery.
In dispossessing the photograph of its sometimes still fast-held authority, and tracing both its admissions and untruths, Lycan has established a practice that has, over the past two decades, developed a kind of whispered legend status. In 2016, in Vancouver (where she’s best known), she presented an exhibition (More Than Nothing) about the invisible support structures that undergird exhibition-making; in 2021, in another bout of refocusing, Lycan to consider how artistic and scientific practices can merge, fuse, and collapse into one another.
Kelly Lycan, More than Nothing (installation view), 2016. Photo credit: Dennis Ha. Courtesy the artist and Burrard Art Foundation.
Lycan has also been thinking through the pandemic’s distorting demands on the photographic image—specifically, how Zoom meetings had us peering into our own living rooms through a refracted lens, illuminated by ring lights. She began to break down this fractured photographic image into its constituent parts: light, reflection, setting, time. Everything but the figure.
When Lycan was first invited to respond to the site of Burnaby Art Gallery in 2022, an Arts and Craft–style manse turned gallery on the outskirts of Vancouver (it was once a strawberry farm, then a country retreat, then a Benedictine abbey, then a frat house), she immediately flipped open the gallery’s history, like so many cupboards, and started inspecting their shelves. The resulting exhibition, titled The Fireplace, featured 23 works, including The Roof, The Wallpaper, The Storage Unit, and The Stove (all 2024). In one instance, Lycan did nothing but draw a thin rope across the entrance of a small bathroom, so we could behold the cold, milk-blue light of the room, untouched, quiet, and still. Like a photograph.
On the exhibition’s last weekend, just before Labor Day, Lycan and I held a public conversation and tour in which we walked through each room and talked about what she was responding to—the absences, the presences, the projections. Like so many stage sets, the installations fluttered with their imbued and handled histories.
In the weeks since, Lycan and I developed our conversation further over email, zooming out for a larger view of her perpetually responsive thumbing of the contemporary image.
Kelly Lycan, The Wallpaper, 2024. Photo: Blaine Campbell,Courtesy the artist and Burnaby Art Gallery.
You show us how photographs are in possession of multiple time frames, and that they are unstable. I think you came at this more literally in the past (you put us in the photograph, with Stieglitz’s photos of an exhibition at 291, for instance). But then you shifted into a different modality in the pandemic, which comes to bear in The Fireplace. Can you speak to how you’re addressing the question of photography differently in recent years, and what prompted these shifts?
I have consistently used photography as a subject in my work. Lately, I have been using material relating to the physical form photography occupies—referencing analogue and digital picture-making. I am creating sheets and Mylar strips coated with resin and tissue paper, which is reminiscent of film and emulsion. This material I make does conjure up thoughts of the latent image—one of the most enduring conceptual intrigues for me. An image exists on material, but its value is precarious until it is processed into being. So cool, so cyclical and magical.
I like to think of the digital version of a latent image. It seems to work in reverse. Sometimes, there are iridescent moments on my smudged laptop screen when an image is consumed by a reflection or poor resolution, which dissolves an image into pixels. Maybe the invisibility also occurs in our overconsumption of images. So much processing and swiping renders no poignant or decisive moment.
Taking on the challenge of working with large photo collections is also a shift. I like the objectness of these collections. Figuring out how to display a sizable collection of images is not that different than solving sculpture problems.
Oh I love that, yes. You do treat collections sculpturally. As Anne Low put it in your catalogue, “You use the gallery as material.” Most recently, you brought the outside in, making the Arts and Craft philosophy literal, with the gardens and the strawberry fields. In one installation piece, you even recreated the shingled roof of the Burnaby Art Gallery. Which artists or writers did you look to when you began to assert these themes for yourself? Who has been important to you, at the level of inspiration or artist conversation?
Once I was aware of the Arts and Crafts concept of bringing the outside in, I could riff on it in many ways, and it became a structure to work with. Lisa Robertson’s text “Arts and Crafts in Burnaby: A Congenial Soil” was an influential text while working on the exhibition. She lays out a valuable history of English garden design and the Arts and Crafts movement’s philosophy: “the dearticulation and mirroring of boundaries rendered these two spaces (dining room and garden) as interchangeable social sites.” Robertson also speculates on what the interior details might have been in the house. I was intrigued by these written speculations and how this activity runs parallel with designing a site-specific exhibition or set decorating a location. One tries to consider the history of a place and what decisions might have been made. But there is no absolute truth to work with. A few photographs reveal some background details, but the nuances of the many iterations of the site can only be imagined.
You’ve also long privileged the fragments, the supports, the backgrounds. It seems you’re forever shifting our attention from a “subject” to what’s still there when we’re missing one. As per Joni Low’s 2016 review in Momus, your work looks at “the behavior of matter first (not necessarily in relation to human activity).” It reminds me of something an art history professor once told me about Eugène Atget’s photographs, that they always looked like someone had just left the frame. How do you think about absence and presence in your work lately?
The comment about the Atget photo rings true for me: it is that imagined moment when the person leaves the frame that the identity of the photograph changes. The frame can support more than one subject. The first is the absent subject that has left the frame, the figure we consistently seem conscious of. And second, the background/interior that remains, the empty interior, which is my favorite subject. A photograph of an empty interior makes us conscious of photography as a medium. We are no longer distracted by eyeballs and bodies. The purpose of the photograph changes, and questions arise. Is it documentation, a commercial image, or an artwork?
I look for instances when an object, an image, or a material can be present and absent simultaneously. The house that Burnaby Art Gallery occupies and its many past inhabitants are in that zone. The multiple pieces in multiple rooms of the house/gallery considered that something exists in its current form and dialogue, but the absence of something also exists. I developed work in my studio for The Fireplace, which activated a condition I call “objects in waiting.” Work that is in flux, flourishing and degrading at the same time. Provisional materials that are not meant to support anything for too long, like tin foil, plastic, and tissue paper. The set-dressing photo collection captures this concept perfectly, as the objects in the 4-by-6-inch photos are primarily taken in prop houses. Objects waiting to be part of a mise en scène and then returned to their suspended state shortly after that. It is a cyclical activity.
Kelly Lycan, The Storage Unit (installation view), 2024. Photo: Blaine Campbell. Courtesy the artist and the Burnaby Art Gallery.
An individual image from Kelly Lycan’s The Set Dressing Photo Collection, c.1996-2007. Courtesy the artist.
I might be suffering from the myopia that reading a good book can produce, where all things relate back to the book, but I just read Garth Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain, which is a meditation on the inside/outness of being sick and having your body put into the care of the system, and he—the narrator, a poet—is running the experience of this event through his encounters with art, sort of like a ticker tape that runs under the trauma and boredom of this medical event. It’s almost a coping mechanism, but I think also a reflection of how artists are always working in relation to the world, through art.
He writes: “It’s a way of turning over again the one and the many, I guess, that problem that always plays out in poetry, in all art probably, of wanting to be faithful to the concrete, particular thing, which is where the love in art comes from, I think, what I care about most, devotion to the actual.” And this made me think of you. Your devotion to the actual creates a kind of incandescence around it, where the instability of there being one gets brought into play. You are maybe benefiting from the aura of the objects and collections you work with too. Denying Walter Benjamin his conceit that photography gets deprived of that aura. Does that resonate with you? Also, almost as an image-accompaniment to this question—I really loved what you did with the bathroom in The Fireplace. Can you describe how that gesture came into being, within the larger scope of these considerations around the “actual” and the aura of the inherited object?
There is a “devotion to the actual” but not as a singular or discrete reality. That would put me in the literal zone, and the challenge is to find a way to occupy more than one reality. I wanted to open rooms in the house/gallery not usually used for exhibition space. The ensuite bathroom served several functions over the years. At one point, it became an office; the large claw-foot bathtub was removed and replaced with a desk. A visitor mentioned they had been interviewed for a job in the bathroom. Another artist said their artwork had been stored in the room for some time. The Bathroom in The Fireplace (haha, that’s a nice visual; I love how this title language is confusing the literal with the artwork) is itself a room that once serviced bodies of outgoing fluids and debris. A room that now serves operational functions for an organization. It is an odd room to come upon in a gallery space. This door is usually closed. But in my exhibition, the open door reveals gorgeous Arts and Crafts tiles, a sink possibly from Home Depot ten years ago, the original porcelain base of a shower, a painted cabinet with the wrong paint finish and peeled office labels. There is a window offering stunning light and two other doors; a toilet might occupy one. The wide decorative frame around the doorway in a gallery context suggests an image, a photograph. This is what appealed to me. I opened the door so you might briefly see a picture of a room.
I thought about putting a work in the bathroom, but in discussions with Anne Low, it became apparent nothing inside the room was needed. The only gesture necessary was adding the chord across the doorway. Questions and resonance could arise from one thing. This started the vibration. The chord is an edge, a barrier to expel; one can’t do anything in the most real room in the house. The chord brought the bathroom into the realm of museological display methods. The value of the space changed.
Kelly Lycan, The Bathroom, 2024, Photo: Blaine Campbell. Courtesy the artist and the Burnaby Art Gallery.
It seems you’re often working in response to sites and collections. But what happens in the interim in the studio? And where do you see yourself taking these interrogations of the contemporary image next?
The studio is consistently generating something. As I was making work for The Fireplace, a two-year process, individual works unrelated to the exhibition resulted almost as a by-product. I try to pay attention to compositions and materials that present themselves involuntarily. Accidental encounters are a vital part of having a studio. I guess I am also using the studio as a site to respond to. The constant flux of conditions in my studio informs my production. I often photograph these moments as studio studies. One thing feeds into the other. Ha, there’s the cycle again.
Regarding new work, I will also get back to an extensive photo collection I was recently gifted. In collaboration with artist Justine Chambers, we are attempting to find funding for a multifaceted project inspired by this stunning collection of photographs. The installation, Gazing Not Solving, is meant to facilitate artists’ responses to the photographs. Most images are 667 Polapan Polaroids, 4.3 by 3.3 inches. This type of Polaroid was pulled through rollers to distribute chemistry onto a print, and imperfections were inevitable. So the prints have aged in magical ways; they turn golden, and chemistry stains have appeared. Fingerprints are as prominent as the research itself. The different tools used for research documentation are also captured, like close-ups of laser targets as seen through a microscope, photographs of the oscilloscope traces showing the lifeline of the experiments, and sometimes the pictures are scratched with circles and numbers. Although the research is actual and complete, time has turned the photo collection into a beautiful new realm.
