CANDICE HOPKINS ON ELIZABETH ZVONAR Elizabeth Zvonar, Parallel Dimension, 2007 PARALLEL DIMENSION Window installation detail photo: Blaine Campbell

In a recent conversation about her work, Elizabeth portrait (experienced both by the artist in creating the recent history of institutional critique, Zvonar’s (often signified through the actual architecture of Zvonar brought up a 1990 photograph by American the image and the viewer looking at the warped re - installation alters formal elements to quite literally the building where the painting was housed) and artist Charles Ray entitled Yes as a point of refer - sult), Zvonar’s sculpture looks to the distortion of create a perceptual shift. the represented space (the painting itself) were ence. The life-size self-portrait shows Ray pho - reality and the ambiguity of sight. It is fitting that blurred. Through the creation of this third space, tographed from the waist up wearing a slightly the work was situated in Vancouver’s Downtown Prior to working with bent glass, Zvonar created the experience of looking took on the transcen - wrinkled striped button-down shirt and looking Eastside, an area where the most disenfranchised a number of installations with mirrors. Each work dental and the inability to discern between what preoccupied or perhaps distant. What looking at residents often rely on drugs as a means of coping in this series was comprised of two round mirrors, was real and what was represented in a painting the image doesn’t reveal is that the picture was with everyday life. For her installation, the gallery’s identical in size, which were mounted to face one resulted in a suspension of belief. “By carefully ma - taken while the artist was under the influence of exterior was the site for Zvonar’s work. She worked another. The result was the creation of an infinite nipulating images so that the actual point of view LSD. The distortions in perception caused by the with a glass bender to customize a new window to reflection. The viewer, in walking between the mir - and apparent point of view were in conflict, the art - drug are referenced in the shape of the photo - replace one in the gallery’s façade. The result was rors, was subject to an endlessly regressing image ist could shift the self outside of the flesh ... the graph: it is convex and mounted on curved glass an exercise in subtle augmentations: the window that became increasingly smaller to the point where point of such an exercise was to induce a spiritual (Paul Shimmel relayed in an essay on Ray that the had a nearly perfectly concave bubble about three it disappeared. At the same time that they reveal the experience”2 perhaps aligned to much later experi - experience of coming upon this photograph while feet in diameter at eye level. A material largely im - three-dimensional world through their reflection, ments in with LSD. Zvonar’s work plays in these it was mounted on a similarly curved wall was not mutable and straight was made porous and mal - they also reveal their two-dimensionality as flat spaces between perception and belief, where subtle unlike being under the influence of hallucinogenic leable. Its final form was momentarily inconsistent surfaces as the outer edges of one mirror is always changes in an object and its relationship to space drugs). LSD, first introduced in the late 1930s, was with what we expected to see. Altering the shape visible in the face of the other. Mirrors have a narra - and architecture result in another way of looking, studied for its potential psychiatric and therapeutic of the glass had a direct effect on the material’s tive history of being portals, and as Alice discovered the instances when truth becomes malleable and possibilities and later banned when its recreational translucency and its reflective abilities. While the in placing her hand through the mirror in Through knowledge exists in a state of flux. use outweighed its scientific potential. Its effects unaltered section of the glass remained transpar - the Looking Glass, they are often conduits between are not only sight-based but also cognitive: on the ent, the convex bubble’s reflective abilities shifted one world and another. It is their ability to reflect one hand its ability to alter perception is aligned depending on the distance from which it was seen. that gives them an aspect of the “otherworldly.” Candice Hopkins is a Vancouver based curator and to the “psychedelic,” while on the other its effects Viewed up close, images were dark and skewed Through her use of glass on both a material and writer. Her writing has appeared in C Magazine, on belief have been considered akin to spiritual en - but at a distance of a few feet the reflected image metaphoric level, Zvonar’s works affirm a visionary, Leonardo, and FUSE and in catalogues for the Walter lightenment. The drug produces a chemically en - would flip upside down to form a clear replication yet precarious state of existence that is focussed on Phillips Gallery, Museum London, Catriona Jeffries hanced way of “seeing” and experiencing reality, of the scene outside. the instability of the viewing experience. Gallery, and Kunstradio. She has curated exhibitions whereby emotions, memories, time, and awareness on the themes of architecture and disaster, time and are heightened and ordinary objects and experienc - While the replacement and manipulation of archi - The use of perspective and the creation of paral - obsolescence, shapeshifting and storytelling, and fic - es can take on altered appearances and different tectural elements has its precedent with artists like lel dimensions in art history has its beginnings in tional identities. She is presently collaborating with meanings.1 Michael Asher (in 1979 at the Museum of Contem - Italy in the late 1200s when mathematicians and Makiko Hara to curate a survey exhibition on the work porary Art in Chicago Asher removed several large artists were starting to make radical shifts in how of Afghan artist Lida Abdul. It is fitting that Zvonar’s recent installation at Art - panels from the building’s façade and hung them space was represented in two dimensions. By in - speak is first and foremost about seeing and how on an interior wall of the museum), Zvonar’s work corporating new geometric techniques—precursors 1 Wikipedia, www.wikipedia.org accessed September subtle changes in everyday objects affect their arises from another set of concerns. In a gesture to the seminal works on perspective by Dürer and 10, 2007. meaning and the way they are viewed and expe - more akin to the parallel universe brought about Alberti—paintings were able to take on a virtual 2 Margaret Werthem, “The Illusionistic Magic of rienced. Taking its cue from Ray’s doubly skewed in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass than space where the division between real space Geometric Figuring,” Cabinet 26: 31, Summer 2007.

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