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Elizabeth Zvonar: THE CHALLENGE OF ABSTRACTION
Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto
May 2 - June 6, 2015
by Emma Healey
No matter how well your body works, it's often a weird and unpleasant experience just to have one. This goes triple if you're female-identified in the outside world. Writer Jia Tolentino articulates this nicely: "To be an adult woman is to have your body be near-universally read as a sexual object when, on the inside, you often feel very different, like a Pokémon or a hungover bag of meat."1 As if there wasn't already enough static in just trying to square your own thoughts and feelings with the inescapable, incongruous fact of your physical self, you've got to walk around letting other people press into you all the time - reading a body into your body, reading your body into your self, deciding how you are and how you must be just by looking.
The gallery text for Elizabeth Zvonar's the challenge of abstraction says that her work uses "strategies of aesthetic seduction and sex often found in advertising as a means of teasing out a possible metaphysical or supernatural undercurrent." The metaphysical experience these works aim to encapsulate or express intersects...