Biography

Ewa Monika Zebrowski was born in London, England and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. After a brief teaching career, she began to work actively in the film industry in 1975. She worked in both film production and marketing as well as organizing various film-related workshops and conferences in Canada and abroad until 1997. Then, she completed her BFA in Photography at Concordia University, Montreal in 2001, and in 2003 obtained her MA in Visual Arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Her prints and artist’s books can be found in public and private collections in Canada and the United States, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, the Library and Archives Canada, the Cirque du Soleil, the Canadian Centre for Architecture as well as in the special collections of various universities, including Yale, Columbia, and Smith College to name a few.

Ewa Zebrowski lives in Montreal with her husband and two sons. She is represented in Montreal by the gallery Art Mûr (www.artmur.com) and by the agency 2M2 (www.2m2.ca).

Artist's Statement

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said.
“Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it.”
—A fragment of a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Each time I journey to Venice I am seduced by the light and the silence. Venice is as fragile as glass. An apparition. I draw references from those eighteenth and nineteenth century landscape paintings, vedute, painted by artists who sojourned in Venice before me: Canaletto, Monet, Sargent, Turner, Constable, Morrice. Each in his own way found Venice an inspiration.

And yet, my photos are not landscapes. They are details suspended in time: fragments and moments. They represent a portrait of a city threatened by water, the portrait of a city whose very existence is endangered because of its geography.

The light changes as the fog rolls in, acqua alta, the water rises. Always a melancholy mood hangs in the air.Always I feel a connection to the elements: stars, dampness, the smell of coffee. My interior space.