Sculptor Elizabeth King incorporates a wide array of complex technology in her visual art, including fiber optics, stop-motion animation and computerized optical devices. But at the moment, she's having a little trouble with her iPod Nano.
"Do you know how to turn this back on?" she asks the reporter who's just finished interviewing her during a break from installing a retrospective exhibit of her work at the Sheldon Museum of Art. "I'm borrowing it from a friend and I don't really know how it works."
While King may require some assistance with a tiny music player attached to a small set of speakers, she has spent some 30 years mastering a unique blend of art and science through her creation, study and manipulation of figurative sculptures. Many of the puppet-like pieces will be on display beginning July 18 at the Sheldon gallery, located at 12th and R Streets.
The exhibit, titled "The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye," will feature about 65 sculptures, film animations, installations, drawings and photographs that present a culmination of the artist's lifelong fascination with the human body and soul.
"I've sort of prepared for this for years without realizing it," said King, who apprenticed with a glass-eye maker and has dissected antique mannequins. "I'm first a sculptor but I've always made jointed puppet-like figures, even as a kid. Over time, I got more and more interested in life-like motion."
To further explore that interest, King began using her sculptures in stop-motion and computerized animation. Some of the resulting movement is so minimal and subtle that it requires concentration to be perceived.
"I wanted something that I could pose and have it be an instrument," said King, whose figures, like those in stop-motion films such as Tim Burton's "A Nightmare Before Christmas," are relatively small. "I like that limited kind of motion like when someone is daydreaming. A little bit of movement can let the piece hover on the edge of believability."
Sharon Kennedy, the Sheldon's interim curator, believes King's ability to mix artistic expression with convincing imitation of real life will appeal to gallery visitors. The detailed, meticulously crafted pieces seem almost human, Kennedy said.
"A lot of her objects have the appearance of something very old and classic but at the same time she incorporates this very highly advanced technology in fiber optics and kind of combines those two things," Kennedy said. "It's art, science and verges on robotics. And then there's a certain simplicity to it and a cleanness and precision. All of those things together make it a very interesting kind of show."
But for all of those things to come together, King emphasized the importance of several factors. The glass eyes used in her figures are "really important," King said, and one of the exhibit's displays will include a video of how the eyes are made. Also, in order to capture the intimacy of her work, King has spent a significant amount of time perfecting the lighting of the pieces in the gallery.
"(The installation) has been really demanding," said King, who has put in several 11-hour days just unpacking and assembling the dozens and dozens of crates containing her pieces. Kennedy said the process has been one of the longest installations the gallery has housed.
"I'm very excited about this one," Kennedy said. "We're always trying to push the envelope here, but I do feel this is pretty different. … I do think that this will have a wide appeal to even those people with an interest in the human anatomy and body."
King shares that interest, citing the anatomical wax figures from the 16th and 17th century Italian Renaissance as a major influence on her work. But she tries to couple such biological study with a more abstract exploration of human behavior and thought.
"We are these two things at once; we're this blood and guts and then we're also a personality with a memory," King said. "I like to have both in the work."
Soon, with the aid of an Apple savvy journalist and Sheldon public relations director Tom White, King's iPod is up and working again, filling the gallery with a Bob Dylan tune. King is then able to use the ethereal abstract inspiration of music to help her get back to the painstakingly concrete task of displaying her work, which just happens to strike a balance between the abstract and the concrete.
ryankathman@dailynebraskan.com
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