An advantage of video, an inherently multiple medium, is that it can be in two shows at once. Case in point: a stop-motion animation by Elizabeth King – based on one of her exquisite sculptural mannequin self-portraits – is on view in the artist’s solo exhibition at Danese/Corey in Chelsea, while also greeting visitors to “Uncanny/Figure”, a group exhibition curated by Lilly Wei at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs in Long Island City. Split between venues, this video, made in collaboration with Richard Kizu-Blair, is a singular and embodied presence in each, as befits a work in which an automaton – evocative at once of lay figures, banruku dolls and Egyptian carvings – marvels at itself, enraptured, as it were, by its humanity. King’s Chelsea show, something of a survey dating back to the late 1980s, includes heads at her trademark half life-size and often repeated in different materials, as well as video and mechanized installations. “Uncanny/Figure,” over in Queens, also includes works by Holly Coulis, Jenny Dubnau, Angela Dufresne, David Fertig, Dennis Kardon, Matthew Miller, Sarah Peters, Rona Pondick and Alexi Worth. “One reason for the renewed interest in figuration,” Wei suggests in her accompanying essay, “might be that in an age of the increasingly virtual, it reaffirms the importance of our bodies, reminding us that we are more than incorporeal mind.” But as Wei detects in works by King that, like Geppetto and Pinocchio, succeed in animating the figure, this artist “blurs the divide between the sentient and non-sentient.”
Elizabeth King: Compass on view at Danese/Corey, 511 West 22nd through October 10; Uncanny/Figure on view at Dorsky Gallery Curatorial Programs, 11-03 45th Ave., Long Island City through December 13
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