Noontime Artist Talk
Elizabeth Zvonar is a Vancouver-based artist whose work embraces a variety of media—namely sculpture, installation and collage. While playful in her use of materials and juxtaposition of imagery, her work is socially engaged and aware. In her words, her work opens up “a complex layering of possibility.” Combining elements as diverse as art history and fashion, her work probes metaphysical issues through a plethora of approaches: an aesthetic of the sixties, an interest in gesture, projections of our imagination into an unknown future, the sexual representation of women in advertising and art history.
She graduated from Emily Carr University in 2002. She has since exhibited widely both nationally and internationally at venues such as Contemporary Art Gallery, Artspeak, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Presentation House Gallery, all in Vancouver; Mercer Union, Oakville Galleries, Daniel Faria Gallery, all in Toronto; Cohan and Leslie, New York; Sign Gaienmae Gallery, Tokyo and at Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen, Mechelen, Belgium. In 2008, Zvonar was the inaugural artist at the Malaspina Print Research Residency where she worked with Andrea Pinheiro and was an artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Janice Kerbel led thematic, Cosmic Ray Research.
Zvonar received the 2009 Mayor’s Award for emerging visual arts category, the honoree of Marian Penner Bancroft. In 2010 she was invited as a guest speaker for the CCA Glasgow symposium, How we go on now? with Faith Wilding and Kate Davis to deliver a lecture on contemporary feminism. In 2011, Zvonar received the Emily Award, Emily Carr University’s alumna award in recognition of outstanding achievement and later that year was included in Unreal at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a show that contextualizes contemporary practices and their relationship to Surrealism. Coming up, Zvonar will show a new body of work this spring at Daniel Faria Gallery and later in the summer will lead a thematic residency at Gibraltar Point titled The Future Is Coming Everyday; both in Toronto.
