Elizabeth King combines figurative sculpture with stop-frame animation in works that blur the boundary between actual and virtual object. Intimate in scale and made to solicit close looking, her work reflects her interest in the history of the puppet, the automaton, and literature’s host of legends in which the artificial figure comes to life. She asks, “What is the figure in sculpture now? The representation of the body and its life: can I absorb the news from biotechnology and artificial intelligence but keep art’s ancient pact with theater?”
Her artist's talk will touch on the mind/body riddle, the science of emotion, the human/machine interface, and what the direct gaze means in an increasingly mediated world. Her most recent solo show, Radical Small at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), was on view from February 2017 through January 2018.
The Studio Lecture Series is sponsored by the Millicent Greenwell Clapp Fund for Studio Art.
Image: From the book Attention’s Loop (A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit), Elizabeth King, photos by Katherine Wetzel. Harry N. Abrams, NY, 1999. Pictured is King's sculpture Pupil, 1991; half life-size; porcelain, wood, glass eyes, brass; all joints movable; collection of the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC.
