The term “waggish”—as in, to be playful, mischievous, or prone to jokes—likely emerges from “wag-halter,” an obsolete English word describing someone likely to be hanged. As a literal manifestation of gallows humour, it’s a linguistic history that points to the essential (but perhaps ambivalent) relationship between what’s funny and what’s threatening: how the former works to shelter us against the latter, or at least distract from its inevitability. Elizabeth Zvonar’s latest exhibition, “The Weight, The Worry + The Wag,” deals in the same uneasy balance of states—those of protection, pleasure, and anxiety—and how these conflicting drives intersect within images of mass culture.

At Daniel Faria Gallery, Zvonar has exhibited a new range of collage works, digital scans of fragmented fashion advertisements, art-historical reference points, and other ambiguous images sutured together in uncanny rearrangements. Held together, they seem to register the value (whether monetary or cultural) attributed to their source material, while exposing the underlying human fears this value would otherwise promise to mitigate—perhaps the weight and the worry of the show’s title. In Rose Gothic (2022), a fanged creature tattooed across a figure’s back is engulfed by the lush golden-pink roses that spew from its mouth, growing increasingly fractal and splintered as they multiply. It’s abundance, both luxurious and claustrophobic. In the deceptively simple Ambitions (2023), a pristine white cat stares placidly from behind its long whiskers while the shadow of a larger feline stalks beyond the frame, like an ominous force that lingers beneath what we covet and presume to control.