"The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye," an exhibition of work by artist Elizabeth King, opened Friday at the David Winton Bell Gallery. The show, which runs until Dec. 21, was brought to Brown by the gallery's Director, Jo-Ann Conklin, who said she was first intrigued by the artist's work when she saw a show of hers in Cambridge, Mass., 10 years ago. Since then, she has wanted to bring King's work here. Those hopes have come to fruition with this mid-career retrospective of the more than 20 years of King's work.
King's well-crafted figures, which resemble mannequins, blur the line between real and artificial life. One of her first forays in small-scale sculpture while she was a graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute was a miniature theater-in-a-box that closed around the viewer's head, she said in a lecture at the opening. Her fascination with artificial human forms was enhanced during her time as a freelance mannequin restorer. King uses traditional and modern sculptural techniques to create her work, combining mechanical technology with the modeling and carving of wood, porcelain, wax and bronze to create objects that strike a balance between shockingly realistic and obviously machinelike.
The exhibition in the Bell Gallery investigates what happens inside the head. In a lecture at the exhibition opening, King said that she hopes to explore "the mystery of what goes on in there. Somewhere in there is us. We are all inside looking out." This introspective theory runs throughout her sculpture. The facial expressions and poses of her mannequins are not superficial, but seem to express some inner thought.
The intimate nature of her work is emphasized by its small scale and subject matter. The faces portrayed are either those of her grandmother, her mother or King herself. The artist said that the many self-portraits allowed her to be more "invasive" in her study of the human form. For example, King told The Herald that she shaved her head to accurately depict all the grooves and bumps of the cranium. King's extremely lifelike figures were influenced by stories in literature and film of inanimate dolls and objects coming to life. The machinelike quality of her work stems from her interest in how early clocks functioned.
The sculptures on display are not only stunning in their detail but also mind-blowing in the intense labor that went into their creation. A joint at the base of a wooden thumb alone can take more than a day to perfect. One figure can take three years to complete. The exhibit does a good job of showing the artist's taxing process, with one display case showing the many stages of thumb-making, and another filled just with glass eyes of varied sizes and colors.
King works hard to push her figures beyond being mere dolls or puppets. Her sculptures' hands are created not just to look like hands, but also to physically behave like hands in their gestural properties. The artist said that her objects go beyond aesthetics and were created to be "elegantly moveable."
The fluidity of her work is highlighted in the various video installations in the exhibit. King first began using stop frame animation in the early 1990s to capture all the intricate movements her sculptures were capable of making. She collaborated with world-class animators, who eventually went on to work with Tim Burton, to produce one of her first videos. The resulting video shows an eerily human mannequin slowly turning its head and fidgeting with its fingers like an infant discovering them for the first time. In comparison with today's Pixar dominated world of CGI technology, King describes stop action animation as messier but closer to the artist's hand. This use of real materials allows for a more real life experience.
As King discussed in her lecture, the artificial intelligence world uses the term "uncanny value" to describe the unease felt when looking at a robot that is real, but not quite real enough. The sculptures certainly have that disquieting element but are ultimately much less sinister. "The Size of Things in the Minds Eye" is the culmination of years of hard work investigating and perfecting the art of recreating the human form in appearance and action. While King describes the feeling of seeing so much of her work at one time as both "daunting and reassuring," the audience should also leave the exhibit entertained and enlightened.
