The Experience

Vancouver artist Elizabeth Zvonar conjures romantic sentiment and melancholic undertones in The Experience, a bleached-out collage and light installation boldly positioned in downtown Vancouver during the dreary winter months.

Combining materials and strategies used in advertising, the site-specific public artwork draws tangential connections between thoughtful inquiry and advertorial amusement. A pair of sunglasses is placed in the foreground of a celestial landscape from Mars, creating a scene that reads like a postcard from the future. The 105-square-metre digital collage is accentuated with gel-filtered lighting and framed by a reflective pool of water and colour.

In The Experience, Zvonar continues her practice of appropriating imagery from various sources and media, including advertising, contemporary fashion photography, and counterculture. She amplifies the digital design of her hand-cut collage by dramatically increasing its scale and using theatrical lighting to produce an environment that shifts from a space of entertainment to one of examination. In its totality, The Experience combines classic summer imagery with references to hippie ideals of the 1970s psychedelic music scene, forming a new hybrid that ultimately prompts viewers to reconsider the passage of time and the limits of temporal reality.

The Experience at Offsite outdoor exhibition space is presented as part of MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture, a major group exhibition tracing the history of mashup culture across diverse disciplines, presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery from February 20 to June 20, 2016.