Erica van Zon

Bio.

Making as re-making...

Playful and effervescent, the cunning objects and bewildering scenarios created by Erica van Zon pop and dazzle. Ceramic animals including crooked tigers, pink and purple cats, smudged and raucous cockatoos march across sherbet-coloured shelves. Gaudy Chinese fringing and plastic charms hang from walls, rooms are lit up with home-made studio lights, sound-proofed with with egg-cartons and filmed with a cardboard camera. Floors are littered with rugs whose designs have been taken from dark and serious modernist painting. Blue and white Delftware is homemade and off-balance, Dutch proverbs flash in neon lights and rooms are papered with old film posters.

From neon signs to crochet-hook rugs, vampy performances to ceramics to calligraphic posters, Van Zon turns to one medium, then another. Predominantly an installation artist she creates certain kinds of rooms or milieux, ones that feature either very simple objects or ones constructed from quite mundane or hobbyist materials. Film posters are re-created earnestly with wonky, hand-painted outlines and vivid colours until the paper is wrinkled and heavy with paint. An honesty and clumsiness in making prevails: high-art masterpieces are rendered crooked and inexact designs on a woollen rug, ancient artefacts and remembered ornaments are re-made in modelling material and painted ceramics.

Often the gallery is self-consciously dressed like a film set with furniture or objects staged and crafted from whatever might create the desired effect: colourful custom-made plinths, fringed fibres, hessian sacks, materials used to make stuffed animals, painted cardboard, paper, modelling material, acrylic, enamel, gouache, plastic charms, even nail polish on linen. Drawing attention to lighting, staginess and artifice, sometimes Van Zon’s mode of display brings to mind a coffee-table, at other times it may resemble the properties table of a studio film set or amateur theatre production. There are always lurid colours, imperfect surfaces, crooked lines and cheeky copies.

Putting on a show, Van Zon takes the familiar or the recongisable and renders it slightly funny and wrong. Her loving parodies and crooked translations are tenderly made and although awkward her appropriations are always studied and thoughtful. Examining shared visual cultures with nostalgia as well as a sense of the ridiculous, Van Zon creates little touching tributes, quiet homages that are striking, imperfect and delightful.

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Erica van Zon (b. 1979) currently lives and works in Wellington. Since completing her Masters at the Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 2007 she has exhibited in artist-run spaces, private galleries and public institutions both nationally and internationally. Solo exhibitions include: Verdant Geometry (Scape, Christchurch, 2018), Opal Moon, Local Lime (Objectspace 2017-2018), Coffee Perhaps (The Dowse Art Museum, 2016), Dogwood Days (Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2014 - 2015); The Light on the Dock (City Gallery, Wellington, 2013-2014), Somewhere It’s Dawn (The Engine Room, Wellington, 2012), Kirsty Brice | Sam Mitchell | Erica van Zon (Melanie Roger Gallery (2012), Moving Forward (Rm, Auckland, 2012), Prismatic Time (City Gallery, Wellington, 2011) and Take This With You (Newcall Gallery, Auckland 2009). 

She has also exhibited within curated exhibitions and group shows such as: Additions and Alterations (Dunedin Public Art Gallery, 2020), Everyday Lines (Hastings City Art Gallery, 2016), Knitted and Knotted (The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 2011) and Tender is the Night (City Gallery, Wellington, 2011). 

Van Zon has received significant recognition for her work, In 2016 she was the Tylee Cottage artist in residence at the Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui. In 2014 she was a visiting artist at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. In 2011 she participated in an AsiaNZ/WCC WARE residency at Red Gate in Beijing, and in 2007 she won the inaugural Iris Fisher scholarship at Te Tuhi Centre for the Arts. 

Erica van Zon will exhibit new work as a solo exhibition in September 2023.

For additional information and a complete CV please contact the gallery.

Selected Media.

  1. ERICA VAN ZON: OPAL MOON, LOCAL LIME
    Thomasin Sleigh, Sarjeant Gallery exhibition catalogue
    2017
  2. ERICA VAN ZON'S NEW EXHIBITION
    Courtney Johnston, Nine till Noon, Radio NZ
    2017
  3. UNCANNY VALLEY: Erica van Zon on slippage, scratchy wool and New Zealand's first dealer gallerist
    Victoria Wynne-Jones, The Pantograph Punch
    2016
  4. Serious Play
    Sammy-Rose Scapens, Homestyle
    2014
  5. ERICA VAN ZON: DOGWOOD DAYS
    Aaron Kreisler, Thomasin Sleigh, Bopha Chhay, Rachel O'Neill, Georgina Watson, Martin Patrick, Dunedin Public Art Gallery exhibition catalogue
    2014
  6. THE LIGHT ON THE DOCK: ERICA VAN ZON
    Abby Cunnane, City Gallery Wellington exhibition catalogue
    2013
  7. THE NOVEL AS SPRINGBOARD
    Claire Mabey, Eyecontact review
    2013
  8. THE OBJECT OF HER READING
    Guy Somerset, Listener
    2013
  9. FUN, FAKERY AND DECEIPT
    Virginia Were, Art News
    2012
  10. BEYOND ILLUSTRATION
    John Hurrell, Eyecontact review
    2012
  11. PROPS ROOM CONFIGURATION #2: HOLLYWOOD REGENCY
    Emme Bugden and Paula Booker, Physics Room catalogue
    2008

News.

  1. Erica van Zon & karen Rubado | 1924 | Corban's Estate Arts Centre
  2. Erica van Zon | Homespun | Franklin Arts Centre
  3. Erica vaN ZON | Additions and Alterations | Dunedin Public Art Gallery
  4. ERICA VAN ZON | Verdant Geometry | Scape Public Art, Christchurch
  5. K Road Art Tours
  6. Erica van Zon | Jade Tableau | Te Uru
  7. Erica van Zon | Opal Moon, Local Lime | Objectspace
  8. Erica Van Zon | Everyday Lines | Hastings City Art Gallery
  9. Erica Van Zon | Opal Moon, Local Lime | Sarjeant Gallery
  10. ERICA VAN ZON | WWWII Julian Dashper and Girlfriends | Glovebox
  11. Erica van Zon | By The Laws of Chance | Dunedin Public Art Gallery
  12. Erica van Zon | Coffee Perhaps | Dowse Art Museum
  13. Erica van Zon | Rugs | Double Denim HQ
  14. TIFFANY SINGH, ERICA VAN ZON & LIYEN CHONG | Visiting Asia | Hastings City Art Gallery
  15. An Occasional Rant | Female representation in New Zealand Galleries
  16. ERICA VAN ZON & LIYEN CHONG | Visiting Asia | Te Tuhi Gallery
  17. ERICA VAN ZON | The Quiet Earth | Ramp Gallery
  18. Florence and Friends | Flotsam and Jetsam Pop-up Project
  19. ERICA VAN ZON | Tylee Cottage Residency, Whanganui
  20. ERICA VAN ZON, TIFFANY SINGH & LIYEN CHONG | Imagine Asia | Pataka Art Museum
  21. ERICA VAN ZON | Dogwood days | Dunedin Public Art Gallery
  22. Erica Van Zon | Artist in Residence | Dunedin Public Art Gallery
  23. ERICA VAN ZON, RICHARD ORJIS and TESSA LAIRD | Slip Cast | Dowse Art Museum
  24. Erica Van Zon | The Light on The Dock | City Gallery