Elizabeth

Zvonar

‍

In the work of Elizabeth Zvonar, the familiar is transformed into something profoundly other, oscillating between playful surrealism and incisive cultural critique. Her compositions merge fragments of vintage imagery with interventions, creating a visual language that is at once uncanny and seductive. These collages invite viewers to reimagine the relationships between objects, bodies, and symbols, collapsing boundaries between the personal and the universal, the sacred and the profane. Through her manipulation of form and texture, Zvonar creates narratives that feel simultaneously timeless and acutely contemporary, offering both a mirror and a portal into the complexities of our shared visual and cultural lexicon.

‍

‍

When I began making things with the understanding that I was making art, it was the early 1990’s. I was taking art classes part-time at a local college in Vancouver on the west coast of Canada. Vancouver is a terminal city, it’s the end of the line. People have come here from all over the world for all sorts of reasons. On the one hand, this place is a mix of Victorian values with a whiff of hippy and a mid-century avant-garde scene that gave way to contemporary practices, notably, Photo Conceptualism. The full character of this place also includes a persistent unresolved tension between the settler colonial culture and its original indigenous inhabitants.

In this cultural landscape, collage wasn’t something considered by the dominant art scene to be a legitimate art practice. I was stumbling my way through ideas by cutting up pictures and sticking them on a ground. There were historical practices that surfaced in the books I found in the library stacks that gave me context for what I was doing. Eventually I began to advocate that what I was making was art.

Collage was an activity that I naturally liked to do, in the same way that other artists enjoy drawing or painting. At this moment in time, I had someone in my life who was pivotal to my artistic development and he encouraged my loyalty to collage. Mark Soo was the one in the early aughts, who suggested I scan and enlarge the small pieces I was making and print these out on photo paper. Playing with scale and flattening the images really changed how I saw them and opened up a wide potential for making pictures. Context is everything and the cultural landscape has really opened up since that moment.

‍

My approach to making collage is similar to how I make sculpture. I collect pieces to work with and the work builds slowly after a lot of experimentation and hard staring. At any given time, I’m working on about 12 collage images, of which half will make it to a finished stage.The composition begins using a cut and paste method and then I scan the image and work on it digitally.

Sculpture is a more involved process and relies on having a lot of stuff around. I don’t have the space really to steep myself in stuff these days so when I do have an idea, I rely on my imagination and lots of research before embarking on production. Often when I’m thinking about making an object, I need the production help of others and I work toward the completion in collaboration with expertise.

‍

I’m a big fan of Surrealism. It was the visual and conceptual door that opened up art, the unconscious, and the creative potential of dream states. The process tends to begin as a personal exploration in aesthetics and design I suppose and my goal is to produce a work that can embrace and engage a wider audience. I rely on conceptual play, double entendre and humour to achieve something that gets near to inclusive appreciation.

‍

I recently finished a project where I curated from a museum’s collection as part of an exhibition of my work, curated by Emily McKibbon for Art Windsor Essex in Windsor, Ontario. I included 11 works by 9 artists after immersing myself for the better part of the year in their collection of over 4000 works. It was a major undertaking and the task was broken down into parts whereby I ended up with a longlist of 30 works that logically came together in the 11 works eventually chosen. It was a collaborative process, working with the curatorial and conservation team. I learned a lot and I’m still thinking about what we did while working towards new work. We’ll see what comes next!

‍

‍

Elizabeth Zvonar is a Canadian artist who works across a range of material that lands in the realm of collage and sculpture. Her work was included in the 2021 Gestalten publication The Art of Protest, Political Art + Activism as well as the 2023 Phaidon publication Vitamin C+ Collage in Contemporary Art. She is based in Vancouver and is represented by Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto.  

Website | Instagram

‍