Elizabeth Zvonar: Knock on Wood + Whistle

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Elizabeth Zvonar, "So Help Me Hannah," 2021

smooth pearl on dibond, 7.5" x 5" Courtesy the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery.

Elizabeth Zvonar: Knock on Wood + Whistle

Finissage Sat, MAR 5 / 2 – 4PM

Please join us to celebrate the culmination of Elizabeth Zvonar's solo exhibition at Audain Gallery.

Elizabeth Zvonar's practice is propelled by the stuff of the world. She is inquisitive about contemporary culture's seemingly limitless excretion of images and objects, as well as the histories they validate, the systems of power they work to maintain and, when excised from their original contexts, the subversive potential for reconfiguring their meaning. For the past two decades Zvonar has been working predominantly with collage and assemblage. Her process is intuitive: without a predetermined endpoint, she wades through a vast and indiscriminate accumulation of fashion and lifestyle magazine advertisements, art history textbooks and popular science editorials. After extracting selected images, she juxtaposes one against another, scans, sometimes digitally alters, and enlarges them, to build compositions that present her audiences with wry new narrative propositions about our past and present worlds.

In Knock on Wood + Whistle, Zvonar revisits themes that have been of interest throughout her practice, including the excesses of consumer culture, the search for  spiritual fulfillment, and the commodification of the female body, especially as it has been represented in the history of western art. For this exhibition however, she sharpens these concerns by approaching them through a set of questions about inheritance. Through a series of new collage works and cast bronze sculptures, Zvonar considers the baggage of patriarchy, white supremacy, and western feminism, explores the magnetism of apotropaic objects — things understood to have the power to avert unwelcome forces or bad luck — and considers the relationship between superstition and survival tactics, commemoration, the folly of beauty, and the fragility of fame.

For the first time (but in a natural extension of her working process), Zvonar approaches her host institution’s own art collection as a cache of “found images” to excavate and engage. She selected an unattributed silkscreen print from the SFU Art Collection, produced in 1969, and hangs the work just inside the entrance to the gallery, where its acid toned, psychedelic text reads as an epigraph for the exhibition: Life goes on within you and without you. You may as well “find freedom,” as the late Sto:lo writer Lee Maracle stated, “in the context you inherit.”

Elizabeth Zvonar  received her BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in 2001. Zvonar has exhibited at Artspeak (Vancouver), Western Front (Vancouver), Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver), Musée d’art de Joliette, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), Vancouver Art Gallery, Oakville Galleries and Polygon Gallery (North Vancouver), and internationally in New York, Australia, Japan and Belgium. Her awards include the 2009 City of Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award for Emerging Visual Artist and the 2015 Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA award. Zvonar was short listed for the 2016 Aimia Photography Prize at the Art Gallery of Ontario. From 2012-15 Zvonar held the post of City of Vancouver Artist in Residence. She is represented by Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto and lives in Vancouver.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips