Elizabeth King:

Impossible to Freeze the Moment of Regard

Project Room

Artist Elizabeth King combines sculpture, film and installation. She makes objects, sets them in motion with stop-frame film animation, then presents object and film together to challenge the boundary between actual and virtual space. Intimate in scale--she speaks of an audience of one--and distinguished by a level of craft that solicits close viewing, the work reflects her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet, and literature's host of legends in which the inanimate or artificial figure comes to life.

"Impossible to Freeze the Moment of Regard" focuses on three related works, Eidolon (1998 - 99), What Happened (1991 - 96), and Idea for a Mechanical Eye (1988-90). Eidolon and What Happened are film animations, each focusing on different King sculptures that bear likeness to the artist. What Happened melds the artist, a figurative sculpture and its complex motions, and Idea for a Mechanical Eye through stop-frame animation. In Eidolon, animation of the sculpture Pupil is compellingly slow and subtle. Technically impressive and captivating as film narrative, it is the artifice of emotion that King captures in her subjects by combining archaic and state-of-the-art media that is so provocative.

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