The Challenge of Abstraction is Elizabeth Zvonar’s second solo exhibition at Daniel Faria Gallery. She continues to work with similar themes of fragmented body parts executed through collage and sculpture. Zvonar attempts to identify a line between ritual and abstraction through advertisements found in old magazines, repeating images, and playfulness of materials. What could be the challenge of abstraction that she is referring to? To abstract is to draw something away from it’s whole image, to make it non-representational. Zvonar changes the context of each image she chose to place in the gallery, by taking snippets from different sources.
Installation view of Elizabeth Zvonar: The Challenge of Abstraction with Doubleheader (silk, 58” x 38”) at Daniel Faria Gallery, 2015
The majority of Zvonar’s work are digitally blown up collages. A couple of them are printed on silk, and hung from the ceiling on brass hexagonal bars. They are floating in the air like sculptural pieces, to be observed in multiple angles. “Doubleheader” is one of these pieces, depicting a collaged dark landscape with a red fire for a face on a horizontally mirrored head. The other large silk piece is a collage of a contemporary young woman standing in front of a Renaissance or Baroque painting of a man intimately holding a woman in bed. The woman in the painting is naked and exposed. The young contemporary woman’s head would cover the section of the painting that shows the private parts of the painted beauty. However she is faceless and the image of the painted couple’s portrait is repeated in the empty shape of her head. In the foreground, a phallic shape plastered over the young woman’s body and her T-shirt reads, I Mate. The composition is an interesting layering trick, and a form of disembodiment, separating the body from the mind.
Installation view of Elizabeth Zvonar: The Challenge of Abstraction, 2015, silk, 62″ x 36″ at Daniel Faria Gallery, 2015
“We Play to our Wishes Not To Their Rules” is a large mounted collage that holds a narrative of old age, birth, sex, and luxury. A feminine hand, lustfully holds dripping red raspberries pouring into a mouth, inside a golden goblet, as a duck head on a cane bites her marital finger. Raspberries symbolize childbirth and pregnancies, and they bleed as they lie in the hand of the woman. More menacing animal cane heads of dogs and birds are repeated, the ones you’d expect an elderly rich man to possess for more than just walking. The bottom is framed by a pair of feminine hands covered in gold, crossing each other. Luxury, sex, and angriness conveys a conflicting image that plays with power and gender. Another large photography, “Join the Resistance”, contains a repeating image of stone fists, suggesting a victorious punch to the sky. They exist as a powerful backdrop to the foreground of a collaged marble statue of a decapitated female figure crouching down. Her wavy hair frames her bare breasts, while an exaggerated vintage hand with a glamourous ring on the index finger, shows off her independence.
Elizabeth Zvonar, We Play to Our Wishes Not To Their Rules, 2015, Photo Rag Ultra Smooth, matte laminate, mounted on dibond, U-channel subframe. From Elizabeth Zvonar: The Challenge of Abstraction at Daniel Faria Gallery, 2015
Divided body parts are cluttered throughout the gallery, creating a physical presence of a collage. A 20” x 39” cut out of red supple female lips hang on the wall as a piece of sex. Incense sticks accompany the statues. The spiritual background of incense give the concrete moulds more life. The incense is placed on the tips of toes of shoes and feet, and tips of a hand, that look like they could have been moulds produced from Zvonar’s own body. A suggestion of smell and touch, the alternative sensors, produce a symbolic presence. The three dimensional moulded sculptures become a physical copy of the artist in pieces, while the cut up collages are a copy of fragments of her mind.
Elizabeth Zvonar, Boot, 2015, concrete, insence, 7” x 4” x 4″. From Elizabeth Zvonar: The Challenge of Abstraction at Daniel Faria Gallery, 2015
Elizabeth Zvonar, It’s the gaps that change the sequence, 2015, Concrete knee cast & Matte Kodak Ultra Endura mounted on dibond, 9” x 6” each. From Elizabeth Zvonar: The Challenge of Abstraction at Daniel Faria Gallery, 2015
The play between the invisible and physical world is very prevalent in Zvonar’s images. The challenge of abstraction, is trying to take pieces of an image, and to create something new out of it, while erasing the connotations associated with it. Every object is associated with a culture, a moment, or a specific purpose. Each piece becomes the gist of a feeling, a summarization. We live in a world of excess of images, tied to multiple meanings. Zvonar uses the symbols as a vocabulary for something metaphysical and new. The challenge is to take the images, and arrange them in a way to let the subconscious mind speak.
Tetyana Herych
Images are courtesy of Danial Faria Gallery
*Exhibition information: May 2 – June 6, 2015, Daniel Faria Gallery, 188 St Helens Avenue, Toronto. Gallery hours: Tue–Fri 11 am –6 pm; Sat, 10 am – 6 pm.