Paula Lycan
2026 Aurora Workspace Residency
2026 Aurora Workspace Resident Paula Lycan is an artist and educator working in photography and traditional darkroom practices, using portraiture to trace a broader view of their relationships, memory, and emotional landscapes. Lycan documents and celebrates small moments that make us human — love, loss, longing, and desire. They write of their work:
When the world feels spun into a state of entropy, this work offers some semblance of order. Bodies exist in transitional states, while landscapes blur the edges of form. Time and identity are suspended in an attempt to restructure. Hierarchies and society temporarily dissolve to create space for future existences that are more fluid and malleable.
In my portraiture, I collaborate closely with my community and a decade-long documentation with my partner. I portray the people I photograph as beautiful and individual, allowing them autonomy to shape and co-author their narratives. The process becomes a push and pull, a negotiation of boundaries and vulnerability. The landscape work operates as psychological mirrors, spaces where the emotional tone of the portraiture continues to echo. These environments are less about geography and more about evoking a charged terrain.
Photographing on medium format film and making the photographic print in the darkroom is an integral part of my process. It is the time when I can put my hand into the work. Each photograph captures not only a single instance but also the environmental conditions, temperature, humidity, and dust particles from that day covertly embedded in the emulsion, attempting to fix residual memories. Through this exploration, I investigate the tension between what is physical and what is latent.
During the Aurora Workspace Residency, Lycan plans an intensive printing period to create approximately 20 finished 20 x 24 prints from their ongoing series, Somewhere Closer to Home, a project utilizing portraiture, landscape, and traditional darkroom practices to explore themes of queer identity, intimacy, and the human desire for both being and longing. In addition to printing, Lycan hopes to edit, sequence, and finalize the project.
Paula Lycan is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Photography at Columbia University. She has exhibited at The Jewish Museum and the International Print Center New York, and has artwork in the collections of the Mead Arts Museum. She has been a past artist in residence at Far Rockaway Artists Alliance, Hercules Art Studio Program, Catwalk Art Residency, and The Residency Project. She received her BA from UC Santa Cruz and her MFA in Photography from Columbia University. She currently lives and works in NYC.
The Aurora Workspace Residency offers a two-week intensive work period for experimentation, research, and development of new or ongoing projects. Read about previous Aurora Workspace Residents: Hillerbrand+Magsamen, Jamila Martin, Cali M. Banks.
The Aurora Project Residency would not be possible without the following partnership:
Pending scheduling, the resident will stay at CAMi as part of a continuing program for visiting artists staying and working at the CAMi campus all year round. Aurora PhotoCenter thanks CAMi for its generous support of this residency.
