During the last seven years, Ontario based artist Kit King has struggled with agoraphobia which is clinical anxiety in response to open spaces. As she explains, she lives her life “behind the same walls day in and day out” and worries she may never see her art outside the studio. Her emotions and relationship to spaces inform her works, featured here on our blog, and while highly technical, they represent the artist’s study of identity in the context of space.
“Through a focus on hyperrealism, my paintings are reflections of identity, dimension, and the ephemeral visual relationships around us. Using mainly oil paint as my medium, I create sensitive portraits that capture fleeting moments that affect our emotional state from a singular glance, under the aegis of a heightened sense of reality,” King says.
King’s eye for accuracy and uncanny detail meets abstraction as she expresses her struggle with agoraphobia in newer works, debuting in her solo “”Dimensional Analogue” later this month at Last Rites Gallery in New York. The show is intended as a platform where King can break down space into its most simplest, abstract form as she encounters it. It also provides her with a tangible form of control as she manipulates each image in terms of light and shadow.
“My current bodies of work are heavily focused on light, shadow and dimension, and how the element of light can alter the relationship of a viewer and subject. The goal being to propel the audience to connect to one transient moment, captured through mood, established from the control of light and shadow, she says. “I do not merely want to meticulously capture an image, but rather breathe a vital life force into transformed renditions of the world around me.”
