the same splendor
Kelly Lycan and Celia Perrin Sidarous
GALLERY 295
September 5 - October 11, 2014
This exhibition folds the practices of Kelly Lycan and Celia Perrin Sidarous together as they investigate the value of objects through photographic installation. Working collaboratively Lycan and Sidarous highlight a phrase from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons as an imagined arc for their mutual fascination with the latent presence of objects. Lycan explains The Same Splendor is about “the pathetic and the amazing”, the vibrant matter and familiar ubiquity of everyday objects. Lycan and Sidarous use photographs, objects, and images of objects as stand-ins pointing to something elsewhere. In working through objecthood of images, this exhibition evokes what Jacques Rancière defines as the sentence-image, an arrangement of aesthetic functions that undo the representative relationship between text and image, and in the case of this exhibition, objects and their meaning.
With the geographic interior of Canada between them, Lycan and Sidarous employed an isolated stream of photographs as a research dialogue for this exhibition, in doing so they highlight the sentence-image as a methodological imperative. This photographic exchange between the artists emphasizes the permeability of the still life within their respected practices, as both see the still life as a reference point to dismantle and embrace. The resonance of communicated images having a representational meaning poignantly present to the sender and at the same time remaining illusive to the reader provides insight towards the way in which both Lycan and Sidarous understand material as potential objects called into being. This exhibition highlights this constant negotiation as a collaborative installation of objects and images within the gallery. Enlisting pre-existing works both Lycan and Sidarous situate the experience of objects as a form of examined aesthetic communication.
Exhibition text Patryk Stasieczek, co-curated with Mike Love and Jason Gowans.