More Than Nothing

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More Than Nothing is an installation work by artist Lycan, which explores the aesthetics of museum interiors, architecture, and display models. The exhibition is based on Lycan's research on display systems from museums worldwide, where she photographs and collects images of plinths, shelves, and display cases built to showcase artworks and artifacts. Lycan recreates these shelves and walls with drywall and house paint in various shades of white, the same materials that make up the interior of the exhibition space. The installation focuses on these ordinary structures and foregrounds their significant function within the history of art, exhibitions, and museum methodologies. The display shelves are reborn as minimalist sculptures and abstract paintings, compositions, and still lifes in themselves. The exhibition blurs the boundaries of art and the white cube space of the gallery, seamlessly melding the two. Viewers are asked to imagine these objects' trajectories between various mediums and contexts. 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.

A Light Response

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