The Faceless Familiar

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Elizabeth Zvonar, "Mind Palace," 2022

baryta on dibond. Courtesy of the artist and Daniel Faria Gallery.

Opening Reception: Saturday, Dec. 3 from 7 to 9 p.m

The Faceless Familiar conjures unsettling images of distorted faces and portraits of someone we might expect to know. Read in another way, the title references the familiars of medieval folklore, supernatural entities that could manifest in numerous forms to aid their witch or sorcerer. Similarly, each artist has conjured their own mystical, absurd, humorous, emotional, or even supernatural version of the familiar figure. Barry Doupé, Nick Sikkuark, Kasia Sosnowski, Alison Yip, and Elizabeth Zvonar shape and misshape the body, gesturing towards its changing, complex identities.

Through mediums of collage, assemblage, computer animation, ceramics, painting, drawing, and sculpture, each artist delves into the psychological states beneath the visage. Barry Doupé’s video animation Red House channels the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia, a desire to find human characteristics within inanimate objects. The distorted faces of Red House accompany Kasia Sosnowski’s exaggerated ceramic figures as they psychically manifest internal feelings. Zvonar’s collages with their unexpected combinations of faces, landscapes, art historical, and commercial references are divorced from their original context but contain a subversive power in their resulting combination.

Dabbling in both the grotesque and the comedic, The Faceless Familiar taps into broader feelings of unrest in the hidden portions of the psyche. In the work of Alison Yip for instance, sunflowers and the moon anthropomorphize into characters who interrelate and experience emotions from reflection to boredom. Nick Sikkuark’s drawings depict the supernatural transforming power of Inuit Shamans. Disembodied heads zip through the sky and men metamorphose into beasts.

The morphing of the face, an essential aspect of identity, suggests continually changing ideas of self and other. Traditionally, representations would try to fix selfhood, otherness, or identity in place, attempting to make them stable and knowable. However, each artist’s depictions of bodily transformation evoke the mental and physical metamorphoses experienced in social, spiritual, commercial, and private space, suggesting that identity is always in a state of becoming.

Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator

Barry Doupé is a Vancouver based artist primarily working with computer animation. His films use imagery and language derived from the subconscious; developed through writing exercises and automatic drawing. He often creates settings within which a characters' self-expression or action is challenged and thwarted, resulting in comic, violent and poetic spectacles.

His films have been screened throughout Canada and Internationally including the Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor, Michigan), International Film Festival Rotterdam (Rotterdam, the Netherlands), Anthology Film Archives (NY, New York), Lyon Contemporary Art Museum (Lyon, France), Pleasure Dome (Toronto, ON), MOCCA (Toronto, ON), Whitechapel Gallery (London, UK), Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver, BC), and the Tate Modern (London, UK).

Nick Sikkuark was born in 1943 near Garry Lake in the central Canadian Arctic. He spent the first years of his childhood absorbing the traditional culture and spiritual beliefs of the Netsilik (“people of the seal”). A self-taught artist, his first works were ivory miniatures depicting polar bears and other wildlife. In the 1970s, he began using organic materials to make the fantastical sculptures for which he would become well known. In 2003, Sikkuark shifted his practice from carving to drawing on paper, producing a significant body of work in the medium. Sikkuark died in 2013.

Kasia Sosnowski is an artist from southern Alberta - she graduated with a combined BFA in both Art History & Museum Studies, and Art Studio from the University of Lethbridge in 2014. Her work focuses on how clay embodies ideas around care, fragility, and transformation. She draws from individual experiences as a means to explore difficult ideas around transgressive bodies, grief, and recovery. The content she explores is mirrored in the precarity and material flux of ceramic sculpture - fragile and vulnerable yet crystalline. Her use of absurdity and humour is a method to cultivate access and intimacy. She is currently living in Toronto, Ontario where she is an MFA Candidate at York University. Her thesis exhibition, is that a promise or a threat? is scheduled for April 2023.

Alison Yip works through painting, wall treatments, writing and objects to find ways of speaking to the dissociative and dispersed nature of our cognitive apparatus and the persistence of figuration, especially through psycho-phenomena: Tulpamancy, pareidolia, and sleep paralysis. Recurring actors and everyday objects charged with animism appear in her works and are put to the task of "figuring out." Playful use of various pictorial modes, everyday materials and perspectival regimes, generate explorations into broader experiences of the human senses, power relations, and sense of self, accumulating into a type of “cursed figuration.” Recently, she worked with two psychics to determine two different visions of the future for herself, including what materials to work with in her practice and how her relationship would be with her current gallerist.

Elizabeth Zvonar makes objects and pictures that think through metaphor and the metaphysical, often using humor and referencing art history while noticing the discrepancies between the sexes and regressive hierarchical structures. She started out in the Capilano Fine Arts Department in 1992 and did a couple of semesters in Japan at Hokkaido University of Art + Design before eventually making her way back to the west coast and graduating with a BFA from Emily Carr University in 2001. Her work has been included in the 2021 Gestalten publication The Art of Protest, Political Art + Activism. She’ll be included in the upcoming 2023 Phaidon publication Vitamin C+, their first comprehensive overview of collage. Zvonar is represented by Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto and lives in Vancouver.