Candice Hopkins
Candice Hopkins is the Elizabeth Simonfay Curatorial Resident, Indigenous Art, at the National Gallery of Canada and formerly the director and curator of the exhibitions program at the Western Front, Vancouver. She is co-curator of the exhibition Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years, opening in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in January 2011.
ELIZABETH ZVONAR
August 1–September 1, 2007
Ongoing installation in Artspeak’s windows while the gallery and office are closed for August.
Investigating perception and the abstract aspects of knowledge, Elizabeth Zvonar’s practice is rooted in the experiential. Whether weighing in on the meaning of luck (good and bad), examining utopic and futuristic impulses (in the forms and symbols of yogic practices or within the nostalgia of youth and music cultures), her work troubles the distinctions between belief and so-called truth. Recently, Zvonar has been working with mirrors, glass and reflection in her consideration of perception and experience. Her paired mirrors create infinite reflections that both incite notions of the future as well as a slippage into the past. These reflective works provide a context for her most recent project at Artspeak.
Parallel Dimension approaches the instability of perceptual experience. Working with a glass bender, Zvonar will replace one of Artspeak’s storefront windows with a distorted duplicate. The installation will be on display round-the-clock for the month of August while the gallery is closed. The distortion created by Zvonar’s window will highlight and challenge the audience’s expectations of art-viewing, window-shopping and pedestrian browsing. The bowing of the window and the resulting distortion in both its transparency and reflection (in contrast to the expectation of the window as a stiff and straightforward material) suggests the warping of reality. This warping can be specifically linked to cinema and television and the inevitable caricaturization of “reality,” but can also extend to local social realities. The title evokes a quasi-futuristic universe, yet hinges on an antiquated notion of that future. In its focus on the experience of looking and its disruption of the expected, Zvonar’s Parallel Dimension open-endedly questions perceptual constructions and accepted knowledge.
Elizabeth Zvonar is a Vancouver based artist. Since graduating from Emily Carr Institute in 2001, her work has been shown in local, national and international exhibitions, including at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Cohan and Leslie Gallery, New York; Western Front Gallery; Vancouver; Queensland University of Technology; Brisbane; Geisai, Tokyo; and Consolidated Works, Seattle, amongst others.
The artist would like to thank Doug and Pat Healy of Seabird Bent Glass Ltd. for their assistance with this project.
JUAN A. GAITAN, MELANIE GILLIGAN, ANTONIA HIRSCH, HADLEY + MAXWELL, CANDICE HOPKINS, OLAF NICOLAI, MONIKA SZEWCZYK, JAN VERWOERT
November 18–November 20, 2011
GreyChurch Collection & Project Space, 3092 Fraser Street, Vancouver
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18
7pm: Antonia Hirsch
8pm: Hadley+Maxwell
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 19
11am: Melanie Gilligan
12:30pm: Lunch
1:30pm: Monika Szewczyk
3pm: Olaf Nicolai
4:30pm: Clint Burnham (Response)
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 20
11am: Juan Gaitán
12:30pm: Lunch
1:30pm: Candice Hopkins
3pm: Jan Verwoert
4:30pm: Marina Roy (Response)
Respondents:
Clint Burnham and Marina Roy
Artspeak and Fillip present Intangible Economies, a three-day forum that broadens the notion of economy beyond its financial dimension. Initiated by Fillip Associate Editor Antonia Hirsch, the Intangible Economies series focuses on the multifarious forms of exchange fuelled by affect and desire and speculatively investigates the fundamental role these affective transactions play in modes of representation and, accordingly, in cultural production.
The premise of Intangible Economies is the assumption that personal relationships are produced by economic activity, and that conversely, affect, and in particular desire, generates economic transactions. In the wake of recent global financial crises, it seems critical to interrogate the notion of “value” in a broader sense. Intangible Economies seeks to tackle the difficult task of tracing the role of affect in economic exchanges relative to artistic production, while also enacting the unruly force of such transactions.
Intangible Economies was initially developed through a series of texts published in Fillip magazine over the past year and will culminate in a book anthology published as part of Fillip’s ongoing Folio Series in 2012.
The Intangible Economies forum is generously hosted by Jane Irwin and Ross Hill through the GreyChurch Collection & Project Space and made possible with support from the City of Vancouver and the Canada Council for the Arts. Additional support provided by Best Western Hotels.