Featured Artist of the month
october/November 2019
Kathleen King
All-One (Sun), 2018, found wood, paint, 60 in. x 50 in. x 1.5 in., photo by Phil Cohen
KATHLEEN KING’s work has been exhibited at Mercury 20 Gallery, The Compound Gallery, Mills College, and Pro Arts in Oakland, as well as the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and the City of Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Civic Center Building.
Kathleen King was born in Oakland. She received a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley. She lives and works in Berkeley.
Artist Statement
Influenced by sources from Constructivism to Arte Povera to African-American quilts, Kathleen King makes assemblages, sculpture, and installations that transform discarded materials through arrangement--interlocking, piling, stacking, hanging, and leaning--often drawing inspiration from urban surroundings to reference construction sites, homeless encampments, architecture, streets, signage and fences.
King's visual vocabulary connects once valuable, now rejected materials with the precarities we encounter in our personal, social and political contexts. The artist explores states of coexistence, contingency and control, drawing attention to how we make our social environments and are, in turn, made by them. The works juxtapose, engage, and balance, challenging viewers into empathy with sculptural objects and with each other.
Monument to the Precariat #1-3, 2018, found plastic buckets, 96 in. x 26 in. x 26 in. each
Heap, 2018, found clothing, wood, paint, 73 in. x 17 in. x 18 in., photo by artist
Asymmetrical Response #2, 2018, wood, spray paint, 20 in. x 20 in. x 1 in., photo by artist