Elizabeth MacKenzie is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver known for her drawing, installation and video since the early eighties. MacKenzie uses drawing to explore the productive aspects of uncertainty through the use of repetition, interrogations of portraiture and considerations of intersubjective experience. Her work has been characterized by an interest in maternal ambivalence, monstrous bodies, interrogations of portraiture and considerations of the complexity of familial and other interpersonal relations.
Elizabeth MacKenzie is sessional faculty at Emily Carr University in Vancouver. She co-curated a number of exhibitions including Persistent Resistance: Early video in Vancouver exhibition in Vancouver with Canadian art historian and Curator Jennifer Fisher and artist and professor, Marina Roy at the VIVO Media Arts Centre in 2008. She co-lead with Cindy Mochizuki and Kristina Fiedrich the Vancouver Draw Down 2011: Summer of Ten Thousand Drawings a citywide workshop series sponsored by the Vancouver Parks Board.
Practice and collaborations
Her practice includes an ongoing commitment to collaboration, curating, writing and teaching. Elizabeth MacKenzie is also one of the founding board members of the YYZ Gallery in Toronto. The Underside of Shadows was a collaboration between MacKenzie and writer Jeanne Randolph that undertook to extend their earlier long distance, technologically mediated collaboration at Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver from September 8 to October 13, 2001. MacKenzie's work has been contextualized alongside visual artistNancy Spero in Jo Anna Isaak's book; Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter. MacKenzie produced the video I am an Artist My name is.... in 1986 with Canadian artist and York University Associate ProfessorJudith Schwarz.
Exhibitions
Solo exhibitions include , curated by Sarah Cavanaugh in 2016 at Seymour Art Gallery in North Vancouver., curated by Darrin Martens, Burnaby Art Gallery at Deer Lake in 2012. "At the BAG, MacKenzie has used powdered graphite to draw portraits of the building’s former occupants directly on the gallery’s white walls. The effect she achieves is pale, insubstantial, ephemeral—ghostly, really." Reunion, curated by Corrine Corry at the Richmond Art Gallery in Richmond, British Columbia. In the 2004 review of this exhibition art critic Robin Laurence writes; "Reunion seems to be about the slippery intersection of love, loss, memory, and meaning; about attempts to call up the dead through both photography and obsessive recollection; and about the impossibility of fixing any person, place, or thing through such attempts." The Underside of Shadows, in 2001 with writer Jeanne Randolph at Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver. Group exhibitions include; , the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, the Glenbow Museum, the Mackenzie Art Gallery and the Vancouver Art Gallery.Dessin-Installation-Drawing-Installation in 1984 at The Sadye Bronfman Centre for the Arts in Montréal curated by Diana Nemiroff.
