What Happened by Elizabeth King

Out from the vaults of our Museum Collection to the light of our Video Wall, the Samek Art Gallery presents What Happened, by artist Elizabeth King.

King described the genesis for this video artwork, “An experimental project in collaboration with director Richard Kizu-Blair, this is a stop-action animation on 35-mm. film depicting the private ruminative gestures of a small life-like articulated figure, a sculpture I call “Pupil.” The shooting and editing were done in 1991 at Colossal Pictures, now gone, but for many years a venerable film and special effects production studio in San Francisco. Blair, as everyone calls him, and Chris Whitney, his producer at Colossal, had invited me to bring one of my sculptures to San Francisco and see what we could do by way of animating it on film, taking advantage of a couple of unscheduled weeks on Colossal’s big animation camera.” King and her collaborators posed the question, “What would we have this small pupil do? On the first day we thought: make it inspect its own wooden self. And thereafter, day by day, we tried one thing after another . . . gradually, a theme emerged, not unrelated to the kinds of things we ourselves were doing to make the film: what does the body involuntarily do when the mind is in motion?”

Elizabeth King received her BFA and MFA degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute and her work is in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Samek Art Gallery.

-Richard Rinehart, Director

Image: What Happened (video still), 1991-96, stop-motion 35mm film animation