In Square Peg, East Bay artist Kathleen King uses spray paint and found wood to create a visual lexicon of pieced-together scraps, misfit shapes, confrontational color and a blunt geometry. Referencing urban architecture, city planning and directional signage, she transforms salvaged materials into painting and sculpture that embodies the emotions and responses of contemporary individuals. King employs the practice of wandering city streets corresponding in earnest empathy with phenomena and objects encountered. She cultivates an awareness of the ways in which everyday life is conditioned and controlled as well as how control is subverted. Improvisation, accident, approximate measurement and asymmetrical patterning are used in her work to conflate the ideal and the real. By investigating visual and social patterns and uncovering strategies, she seeks to connect viewers to possibilities for openness, engagement and creativity.
Kathleen King was born in Oakland, CA and has a BA in Art from UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited at Mercury 20 Gallery, The Compound Gallery, Pro Arts, the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art and the City of Berkeley’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Civic Center Building and is represented in numerous private collections.
