Elizabeth Zvonar, ‘Legs’, 12 mannequin arms holding up a slanted wall, 2009.
As described by curator Emily McKibbon: Elizabeth Zvonar describes this work as a “distortion” of the gallery. When visitors enter the exhibition, they are immediately confronted with a short, four-foot wall slanted at a roughly eighty-degree angle. The sculpture itself is obscured, with the wall providing a strangeness to the space that challenges our ordinary expectations and sets the tone for what’s to come.
Viewed from the front, it appears as though the twelve mannequin arms are casually holding up the wall itself, with just the tips of the mannequins’ middle fingers resting easily on the floor. There are twelve arms referencing the twelve-hour clock.
Mannequins have a long history within art movements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Artists like George de Chirico, René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Hans Bellmer often depicted them in their surrealist works, highlighting the strangeness of their serial anonymity. For similar reasons, mannequins often appear in horror and science fiction films.
The overall impact of Zvonar’s work is more playful, suggestive of the work of the choreographer Busby Berkeley of Hollywood’s golden age of musicals. Berkeley was known for his intricate dance scenes that abstracted his (young, attractive) female dancers’ bodies into elaborate geometric patterns. Berkeley’s last known work, a cold medicine commercial entitled the "Cold Diggers of 1969," fittingly included a scene of dancers forming the moving arms of a ticking clock.