Elizabeth King (artist)
[8][11][12] Art in America critic Leah Ollman wrote that King's "highly articulated automatons invite us to consider how consciousness arises from physical being … she portrays her mechanical surrogates as convincingly self-aware, while we are left to ponder that age-old question: where exactly does the self reside?
[35][13] In her art, King had turned almost exclusively to figurative sculptures by the 1980s, producing intimately scaled works that she gradually refined by perfecting traditional crafts such as carving, modeling, casting bronze, firing porcelain, woodworking and glass-eye-making.
"[16] The mutability of her figures—in terms of anatomically correct poses as well as context, across different exhibitions and media—is a key feature of King's art, related in part to the longstanding influence of traditional Japanese Bunraku theater, which employs puppets in different roles across performances.
Writing about King's exhibition, "Attention's Loop" (Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute, 1997), Marty Carlock suggested that such "peculiar dichotomies" created an aesthetic tension that fed into viewers' fascination with how both machines and humans work.
[25] King's later shows placed her sculptures in a widening range of contexts—custom vitrines, display cases also housing her source materials, multimedia installations—that used minimal means to convey emotional and psychological nuance: subtle movement, acute attention to pose, spare lighting and careful composition.
[25][45][2] These subtle, involuntary gestures—attuned to slight shifts in the tilt of the head or the touching of fingers, which can variously signal cognition, introspection, suspicion, or resignation, for example—often revealed ways the body unconsciously responds when the mind is active.
[11][16][9] For example, What Happened (35mm, 1991/2008, collaboration with Richard Kizu-Blair) depicted King's sculpture, Pupil, in a responsive state reacting to unknown stimuli with common but eloquent actions: the tilt of the head while smelling, the tandem movement of fingers and eyes while sensing objects;[9][7] Attention's Loop (1997) comprised 25 vignettes of a figure initiating and completing a gesture.
[6][46][9] Critics suggest that King's co-presentation of work across media—and the resulting discrepancies in scale, substance and identification—create a sense of uncertainty and uncanniness that blurs perceptual boundaries between actual and virtual object, illusion and reality, human and non-human.
King worked in front of viewers with stop-motion animator Mike Belzer on a custom-built, vibration-free platform stage for seven days, painstakingly setting in motion a pair of jointed boxwood hands through a series of changing poses.
[50][51][52] Leah Ollman described her book, Attention’s Loop (A Sculptor’s Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit) (1999), as an intellectual, sensual and practical chronicle of the conception and creation of her work that "braids together philosophical and phenomenological musings with anecdotes, childhood memories, studio notes, fairy tales and legends.
[54][55] The book's main subject is a 16", carved automaton in the Smithsonian Institution collection commonly known as "The Monk"—according to legend, a depiction of the Spanish Franciscan friar and saint Diego de Alcalá, whose preserved remains were allegedly involved in a miracle at the court of Phillip II of Spain.
