Ossington Community Association Local Goods and Services Auction

title: Royal Palm Soda

2013, mixed media with epoxy resin, gilded frame

19" x 23"

value: $4,200

This gorgeous piece is evocative and provocative on many levels.  Using pages from pulp fiction paperbacks as a backdrop, Zaremba layers color, image, portraiture, and meaning into a luscious, resonant, and subtly Hitchcockian whole. 

Ilona Zaremba's bio:

Born and raised in then communist Warsaw, Poland, Ilona Zaremba immigrated to Canada in 1986. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design and received 7 awards and scholarships for achievement in the arts.  Since 1995, her works have been exhibited nationally and internationally in galleries and art fairs in Aspen, Bolzano (Italy), Chicago, Dallas, London (England), Los Angeles, Miami, New York,  Paris (France), Princeton, San Francisco, Santa Fe, Washington DC, Toronto and Tokyo (Japan).Currently working with reconstructing/deconstructing of the "American" image, she questions notions of gender roles using imagery that have been gleaned from vintage television material, advertising, magazines, and pulp fiction books. Through nostalgia she recognizes and questions our cultural obsession with constructed, very much utopic, but somewhat sleazy beauty in relation between our past and present.

Her work is in numerous private, public and corporate collections throughout the world, including those of Steve Martin, Mert and Tim Campbell, Jordan Goodman, Eddie Irvine and Rob Walton.