blackbird spring 2002 vol.1 no. 1

NONFICTION

ELIZABETH KING

   Reading "Clockwork Prayer" -eds.
   Clockwork Prayer: A Sixteenth-Century
      Mechanical Monk
   Stop-Action Animation by Elizabeth King
      and Richard Kizu-Blair

Elizabeth King's work 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. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Most recently, she has shown at the Meguro Museum in Tokyo, a group exhibition entitled, "A Shriek from an Invisible Box." She is represented by Kent Gallery in New York City (see Links). King received BFA and MFA degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute. She was a 1996-97 Fellow in the Visual Arts at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. Her 1999 book Attention's Loop (A Sculptor's Reverie on the Coexistence of Substance and Spirit), published by Harry N. Abrams, won both a design award in the American Institute of Graphic Arts "50 Books/50 Covers 1999" competition and a Merit Award for Design in the 1999 New York Book Show. In February 2002, King chaired a panel at the College Art Association entitled "The Automaton, the Homunculus and Other Artificial Beings: Towards an Interdisciplinary History." She has just been awarded a 2002 Guggenheim Fellowship. She teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University as the School of the Arts Research Professor in the Department of Sculpture.  

Photo by Carlton Newton