Elizabeth Zvonar


Elizabeth Zvonar is a Canadian contemporary artist that works primarily with mixed-media collage and sculpture based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is currently represented by Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Life and education

Zvonar was born in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She has attended Aichi Gakusen University in Toyota City, Japan, Capilano College in North Vancouver, Canada, and Hokkaido University of Art & Design in Sapporo, Japan. She ultimately received a BFA at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada in 2002, the same institution that would later reward her with the Emily Award for Outstanding Achievement by an Emily Carr Alumna in 2011.

Work

Working extensively with collage materials, Zvonar’s practice works towards presenting a new history by collecting images from a variety of sources and reinterpreting them through juxtaposition. By working with images of the female body, Zvonar’s work reinterprets the use of female representation through a reductive and additive process that investigates the nuances and disparities of printed material in relation to identity formation.

Solo Exhibitions

Zvonar has exhibited at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Daniel Faria Gallery, Artspeak, and the Vancouver Art Gallery Offsite. In 2017, Zvonar participated in a residency at the Burrard Arts Foundation, where she exhibited her solo show To You it Was Fast.
Her workTHE CHALLENGE OF ABSTRACTION was exhibited at the Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto from May 2 to June 6, 2015. Zvonar exhibited collages, sculptures, and casts. One of her featured works, IT’S THE GAPS THAT CHANGE THE SEQUENCE, "presents two different images of open legs arranged in a mesmerizing spiral."
In 2018 her show Banal Baroque waswas presented at Daniel Faria Gallery, which explored themes of "bodily and sexual excess" by "recontextualizing mass-produced objects, mass media objects, magazines, and mannequin parts to animate the uncanny treatment of the human figure that lies dormant in this source material." Her work is noted to evoke Surrealist and Dadaist collage, particularly those of Hannah Höch. Amongst the exhibited works were Marcel Meets Judy, which featured a "mass-produced pink seashell candy dish." This object was rendered obsolete from its function and references Marcel Duchamp’s readymades and Judy Chicago’s porcelain vagina-flowers in The Dinner Party, 1974-1979.

Artworks in Collections

Elizabeth Zvonar's artworks can be found in the following collections: