Kathleen King’s recent assemblage and sculpture is comprised of materials gathered from city streets and the waste stream. This new body of work colligates discarded manufactured objects—plastic containers, metal frames, and other found structural pieces—with fragments of clothing and other detritus. As modernist geometrical forms are combined with improvised and precarious formations, 20th and 21st century systems and ideas are referenced and re-arranged. What are we made of?

 

In An Event in the Form of Questions grids and structures evoke the given order from high-rises to prisons. They negotiate with torn pieces and piles of discarded clothing and detritus from dumpsters, gutters, and trash piles—stacked, tied, hung, leaned. Events live and change among givens. How are we connected?

 

This work challenges viewers to look at abandonment and lack as both material and spiritual conditions, as well as to think about satisfaction, which is linked to consumption and our global climate catastrophe. What do we need?

 

Kathleen King has been exhibiting art in the Bay Area since 2000. She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a BA in Art and is a founding member of Mercury 20 Gallery in Oakland, CA, where she has exhibited her work since 2006. King has also exhibited at the San Bernardino County Museum in Redlands, CA; Your Mood Gallery in San Francisco, CA; The Compound Gallery, Mills College, and Pro Arts Commons in Oakland, CA; the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato, CA; and the City of Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Civic Center Building and Berkeley Art Center in Berkeley, CA. www.kathleenking.carbonmade.com