Ewa Monika Zebrowski
in Grand-Métis
EXHIBITION
Light and fog
Thérèse Beaulieu Roy Hall, Estevan Lodge | Reford Gardens | 200 Route 132 | Grand-Métis
June 1 to October 6, 2024
Schedule and admission on the Reford Gardens website
Ewa Monika Zebrowski, Outremont, Québec | ewazebrowski.com
Anna Lois Dawson Harrington (1851-1917), watercolorist
Ewa Monika Zebrowski, photographer and poet
Ewa Monika Zebrowski was invited to be an Artist in Residence at the Reford Gardens in Grand-Métis in July 2023 by curator Helene Samson. During the residency she had an opportunity to experience the landscape and community that had inspired the artistic life of Anna Lois Dawson Harrington.
Anna Lois was the daughter of Sir John William Dawson, a principal of McGill University. She lived in Montreal, and spent her summers in Métis with her ever-growing family, nine children in all.
In the 1890s, Little Métis, today known as Métis-sur-Mer, began to be a thriving summer community, with many anglophones vacationing on the rugged shores of the mighty St. Lawrence River, a welcome change from city life.
During Zebrowski’s residency, the weather was cloudy, changeable, often with a mist hanging over the river in the morning and in the evening. These were not summer temperatures. Rarely was the sky a bright summer blue with billowing white clouds.
There was time for walks on the beach and collecting rocks and shells, the wild roses and lupines in full flourish. She found inspiration in the same landscape that had inspired Anna Lois so many years before.
She explored the landscape with her camera, searching for the poetry.
And she began to write.
Anna Lois left a legacy of over 200 watercolors inspired by the summer landscape she experienced so intimately. Those watercolors are today part of the permanent collection of the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal.
EXHIBITION AT RENCONTRES
Light and fog
Ewa Monika Zebrowski is a Montreal-based photographer and a poet.
Her photographs and artist’s books touch on themes of displacement and memory, place and time, traces. She creates visual narratives often inspired by art and literature, sometimes collaborating with writers and poets, sometimes writing her own poems and/or text.
She worked in the film industry for 17 years before obtaining a BFA in Fine Arts and an MA in Visual Arts, having previously completed a degree in English Literature. She speaks Polish, English, French and Italian.
Zebrowski has had 36 solo exhibitions and produced 25 artist’s books and three broadsides. Her work can be found in many museum and institutional collections in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark and Australia, including at MoMA, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine, the Tate Britain, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Columbia, Yale and Stanford universities, the National Poetry Library in London, and McGill University.
Since 2012, the celebrated artist Cy Twombly has been a main inspiration for her work.
In 2023 she published I NEVER KNEW CY TWOMBLY, Bassano in Teverina with Nearest Truth Editions.