Kelly Lycan brings site-specific art to the Burnaby Art Gallery with The Fireplace
New exhibition sheds fresh light on different rooms in the 1911 Edwardian building
Kelly Lycan, The Storage Unit (detail), 2024, plastic bins, photographs from set-dressing photo collection, dimensions variable, The Fireplace. Photo by Blaine Campbell
The Burnaby Art Gallery presents The Fireplace to August 25
THE BUILDING THAT houses the Burnaby Art Gallery has a storied history. One of the best examples of Edwardian architecture in the Lower Mainland, the structure dates back to 1909, when Henry and Grace Ceperley purchased a strawberry farm on the north shore of Deer Lake and spent the ensuing two years building their retirement home, Fairacres, designed by British architect R.P.S. Twizell. In 1939, a group of five Benedictine monks purchased the Ceperley property, adding a gymnasium that later became the James Cowan Theatre when the City of Burnaby bought the property in 1966. For a short period prior to the City purchase, the home was used as a fraternity house for some of the first students to attend Simon Fraser University.
Local artist Kelly Lycan has always felt drawn to the home’s main fireplace, which became the jumping-off point for a site-specific exhibition at the gallery called The Fireplace. “I’d always been enticed by the arts and crafts fireplace,” Lycan says in an interview with Stir. “With Canada being such a new country, we don’t encounter craftsmanship that often in British Columbia. I would always say hello to it and have this desire to work with it or respond to it. I started responding to the fireplace and to the history of arts and crafts movement.”
Lycan, who has a master’s of fine arts degree from the University of Western Ontario, is a photo-based installation artist who looks at how objects and images are placed and displayed in the world, and the resulting cycle of value they experience.
“When we began our discussion back in 2022, Kelly let me know about her interest in the gallery in terms of site-specific installation,” says Jennifer Cane, director and curator of the Burnaby Art Gallery, and curator of The Fireplace. “In particular, Kelly has been fascinated with the fireplace in the main gallery and the presence it holds. She showed me a work that is like three-dimensional wallpaper [called] The Wallpaper; it referenced the transition to virtual spaces such as Zoom. I was drawn to the juxtaposition of the wallpaper in our space.
“Since there are fixtures and heritage aspects pretty much everywhere in this gallery, I feel like an artist needs to enter into a conversation with them. Kelly is quite well known for reproducing archival photography as installation. I first saw this in her incredible exhibition, Underglow, at Presentation House 10 years ago. I was intrigued as to what she might find within the space here. She’s looked closely at a few things that surprised me.
“Several of the works in the exhibition point to slivers of former occupants, the styles of furnishings and objects they kept in the house, and draw on Kelly’s long history as a set decorator for film,” Cane adds, pointing out the work titled The Storage Unit, which is filled with roughly 1,000 photos of objects, sorted into families.
“It’s interesting that this work finds itself here at the Burnaby Art Gallery, seeing as Burnaby is quite well known for film production,” she observes. “Kelly convinced us to reconfigure and open up a few spaces that aren’t normally shown to the public for exhibition, such as The Bathroom. She’s kind of signalling that the house is part of the exhibition and can be part of the work. “
One example, Cane sites, is Lycan’s work The Auction, which features a Vancouver Sun ad from 1918, in which the original contents of the home were being auctioned off. “This piling up of occupancies and coming and going of tenants is very familiar to everyone living in this region. Our lives are really dictated by what kind of spaces we can inhabit and there’s a lot of precarity for most involved in the arts. There’s commentary on our present moment as well as the past,” Cane observes.
Kelly Lycan, The Stove, The Fireplace. Photo by Blaine Campbell
Another work in The Fireplace is a recreation of Emily Carr’s stove from her Victoria studio; Lycan has topped it with a swan made out of tin foil, the kind that people used to get takeout food in. “The Emily Carr stove is in a former bedroom of the house, next to another tile fireplace,” Lycan says. “It represents more of the creative force of the artists. In the arts and crafts movement there were all these craftspeople doing all this beautiful work but only the wealthy had access to it. I’m kind of contrasting the different economies of heat sources. The stove becomes the surrogate for the artist, the maker, the life force.”
She goes on: “It’s tapped right into HVAC system of the gallery. There are these huge HVAC tubes in the ceiling of the gallery, so instead of trying to not see it, I’m bringing the background into the work. These different sources of heat reference different time frames, and this house cycled through so many different fascinating occupants. I’m referencing all these different time frames and the cycle of occupants and objects in multiple rooms.
“I wanted to do it [the exhibition] in summer, so the blinds are open so the garden and the colours of the garden could become part of the work,” Lycan adds. “The woman who had this house built really wanted this garden, and I wanted to honour her by having the blinds open so the outside comes inside.”
Lycan works with repurposed materials, mostly paper, plastic, and tin foil in The Fireplace. “I’m thrilled about responding to what the house has to offer and its history,” she says.
“It’s interesting to see how artists navigate, challenge, and converse with the space here, especially as it’s quite colonial and loaded,” Cane says. “It exudes wealth and a kind of ‘former glory’ that is complicated and deserving of some critique. Anne Low writes beautifully for the artist’s book that goes with this exhibition; she speaks about the razed blocks of houses in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland, and the kind of disorientation that can be experienced here. Kelly has created a replica of Emily Carr’s stove that sits in the former primary bedroom [The Stove]. I think of the contemporary version of this little stove for the artist—without a doubt it’s the space heater; you see them in almost every artist’s studio.” 
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