OPENING | Fotofilmic’16 + Elizabeth Zvonar

Elizabeth Zvonar: To you it was fast
Elizabeth Zvonar’s practice is imbued with a longstanding fascination with the seductive excesses of capitalism, the search for spiritual equilibrium, the restrictions of patriarchal society, the history of western feminism, and the commodification of the female body. Featuring her trademark collages scanned and enlarged as digital prints, her new exhibition is the fruit of a recent two-month residency at the BAF.
In keeping with her particular way of working, Zvonar’s new body of work is eclectic in its wide-ranging sources of inspiration, which includes Simone de Beauvoir’s post-war feminist “bible” The Second Sex; early twentieth-century Russian esoteric P. D. Ouspensky’s musings on the cyclical nature of time; and Einstein’s theory of relativity as understood by a New Yorker cartoonist, to name but a few. Juxtaposing equally unexpected elements gleaned from the flotsam and jetsam of western visual culture, Zvonar generates an ambiguous iconography that refuses the limitations of fixed interpretation: a futuristic metallic visor masks the eyes of a face split open, revealing a sparkling jewel; fingers gesticulate in the sign for peace or victory accompanied by the repeated words “The New Feminism”; a naked figure in a desolate landscape runs toward a flaming sun.

Fotofilmic ’16
Presenting 30 promising analogue and film-based photographers from 10 countries through as many single works, FotoFilmic’16 pictures a unique worldview of contemporary photography’s material practices. The exhibition’s underlying vision frames a defining moment and transitionary occupation of film-based photography and its rich lineage of physical craft and recording methods in the context of today’s global digital culture. Running contrarily to the fairly common but largely unfounded notion that a fundamental technological contradiction exists between digital and material photography, FotoFilmic’16 shifts focus on photographers’ practices and how materiality at their core may inform and sometimes defines their end work.

For more information about the shows, visit:
http://www.burrardarts.org/project/elizabeth-zvonar/
http://www.burrardarts.org/project/fotofilmic16/