The Or Gallery is pleased to present Bronze Tinfoil Ball, a new exhibition by Vancouver artist Kelly Lycan.

The exhibition features a single artwork: a small bronze cast of a crumpled ball of aluminum (‘tin’) foil, presented on the floor in the middle of the gallery. The work is part of Lycan’s ongoing interest in the beauty of ordinary objects; beauty that she aims to make apparent through her practice of displacing objects from their original context.

Gilded in aluminum leaf, the bronze sculpture looks nearly identical to its familiar namesake, and it is principally the heavy weight of it that reveals its true material. The bronze ball is produced with the same lost-wax technique used in Classical Greek statuary and much traditional sculpture. The ‘heroic’ connotation of bronze, emphasized by the lighting and design of the exhibition space to resemble early 20th Century museum galleries, is contrasted by the ‘disposable’ connotation of a small ball of foil. This humorous gesture reflects Lycan’s critical practice of examining how value is created across personal, consumer, and artistic worlds and how material objects contribute to the formation of identities and ideologies.

Bronze Tinfoil Ball marks the second project of the Or Gallery’s Economies/1 series, examining systems of value and exchange in contemporary art.