"Twilight" Film Artist Gregory King
Tri-Solo Painting Exhibitions
Three Galleries, Three Glorious Nights in October
In celebration of awe-inspiring art, three galleries will host separate opening receptions of the works by
Gregory King, a filmmaker and multimedia artist based out of Los Angeles.
King was invited in 2010
by the set decorator for the wildly popular film saga Twilight to have his visual art featured as set decor
in "Breaking Dawn" (parts 1 and 2). Several art works were selected and hung in the 'Cullen House' set,
and are visible as backdrop in many scenes. Tah Gallery's curator, Sandy Taylor, has selected these,
among other paintings by King, to be on display in each gallery.
"Residing within the mind of Gregory King is a lofty inner vision of
deep hidden illuminating dimensions. A world which is both inexplicable and unknown, yet inviting, majestic, and evocative.
These sacred landscapes evoke a quest for a fresh interpretation of an altered reality as seen in these canvases, and may just reveal a vital metaphysical essence.
Are the images earthly? Are they celestial energy fields? The works
are luminous, yet dark, as if on the edge of the event horizon, then time begins anew." Tah Gallery Curator, Sandy Taylor
About the Artist (see below)
Gregory King
Gregory King - "Source" at Blackstone Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 90" x 65"
Price: $8,000
Gregory King - "In Earth" at Tah Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 60 x 84"
Price: $12,000
Gregory King - "Constellation" at Aahoo Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 72 x 96"
Price: $10,000
Gregory King - "Intersection" at Blackstone Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 78 x 68"
Price: $5,000
Gregory King - "Transference" at Tah Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 40 x 30"
Price: $4,000
Gregory King - "Chronology II" at Aahoo Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 90x 72 "
Price: $7,000
Gregory King - "Basilicon" at Blackstone Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 50 x 40"
Price: $2,500
Gregory King - "Emanations (Twilight)" at Tah Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 50 x 38"
Price: $7,000
Gregory King - "In Memoriam" at Aahoo Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 65x 96"
Price: $6,000
Gregory King - "Intermediary" at Blackstone Gallery
Oil on Canvas, 78 x 65"
Price: $6,000
Gregory King - "Goreckis 3rd (Twilight)" at Tah Gallery
Mixed Media on Paper, 30 x 30"
Price: $4,000
About the artist
Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, King has wide-ranging experience in a number of artistic disciplines: painting, film and music. He received his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute, and ran a small offset-printing business while living in Chicago, making artist books, poetry collections, and CD booklets for indie rock bands. During his years in Chicago he also led several large-scale outdoor mural projects with disadvantaged youth for a number of Christian and non-profit institutions.
King received grants for painting from Arts Midwest (an NEA Regional Fellowship), the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, and the Mustard Seed Foundation in the form of a Harvey Fellowship. He holds an MFA from Hunter College in painting, and while there he received a scholarship to attend the Glasgow School of Art in Scotland.
As a visual artist, King has exhibited widely in a diversity of venues across the country and abroad, such as the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC, the Foreman Art Gallery in Sherbrooke, Quebec, the Organization of Independent Artists in New York, and the Butcher Shop Gallery in Chicago.
From 1995 to 2007, King was a member of the music group Rachel’s, and projected original Super-8 films to accompany their live performances. He looks at this body of work of “cutting film to music” as the basis for his sensibilities as an editor and general approach to film and cinematic media. He toured extensively with Rachel’s throughout America and Europe, with special appearances at the Merkin Concert Hall in New York (WNYC’s New Sounds Live Series 2006), the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2000-05), On the Boards, Seattle (2003), and the 2002 All Tomorrow’s Parties Music Festival in southern England. The group opened for PJ Harvey on her 2008 “Is this Desire” tour across the United States.
King has also worn the hat of a film and video projection designer for live theater in New York, working with acclaimed director Anne Bogart and the SITI Company (“Hotel Cassiopeia” and “Systems/Layers”) and artistic director Lear deBessonet from Stillpoint Productions (“Bone Portraits” and “The Eliots”), among others.
He directed, shot and edited the experimental film cycle "Rotating Mirror' , which received grant support from Angels Net Foundation and the Jerome Foundation. His dance film 'chloes' (co-created with choreographer Lea Fulton) premiered at the 2010 Dance on Camera Film Festival at Lincoln Center, NYC, and his recent documentary Our House (co-created with David Teague) received its World Premiere at the prestigious 2010 Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto. Our House has won top awards for a documentary at film festivals, has broadcast deals in the USA and Poland (DOC Channel and Canal + Poland, respectively), and is available on DVD.
We invite you to meet this very accomplished artist and view his spectacular visual imagery.
The exhibitions will run through October 31, 2013.
Artist's Statement
At the core of my work is the desire to engage perception, to
visually interpret both the fundamental material and spiritual
dimensions of the world, to navigate the possibilities of how these
are distinct and yet intertwined, and to recognize art as a potent
means through which to experience and connect the two.
I'm consistently compelled to visually excavate or poetically
transform the infinitely complex interactions between humanity and
the environment. This is intriguing for me in terms of the
"constructed" and the "unintentional," such as how architecture,
the urban grid, and the systematic or indiscriminate "marks" made
by society interact with and compose transitory landscapes and
physically profound spaces. It is not a matter of factually
reiterating what already physically exists, but how these forms and
networks allow for a visual dimension that engages the imagination
in time, embodying the terrain of the mind within the broader
environments that surround us, be they psychical, spiritual,
social, technological or natural.
A principle direction my recent work has taken involves a
dialogue between the plastic (painting, drawing, etc.) and
cinematic arts (e.g. celluloid film, digital video), in terms of
how their respective static or time-dependent contexts can be
interchanged for unique perceptual experiences. The idea that an
"inner life" exists in a painting or film is explored, such as
treating the visual structure of a painting as something that can
be reconfigured into a film or video, or looking at the series of
frames that comprise a strip of celluloid film as a visually
compelling object on its own right. In the painting "Diegesis,"
for example, I had wanted to make a work that treats the windows of
skyscrapers at night as a vast cinematic structure, where every
individual story (or "window" as it were) contributes to a larger,
unintentional but fascinating whole. During the process of
creating it, however, I realized that the unfolding image could be
literalized as a filmic experience. I therefore videotaped each
individual "frame" in the painting sequentially, and created a
short film with them where, in essence, the painting is "played"
beside itself. This mirrored expression of a work in an entirely
new context became for me an analogy of the duality between body
and spirit. Each manifestation of the visual "information" at hand
is a distinct experience on its own right, but together they share
an indelible and mysterious connection that effects your
perceptions of both. Once I made the film of the painting, I saw
the painting in new ways, and vice versa.
The subjects I gravitate to largely derive from the tacit
understanding that we are, essentially, "surrounded" by phenomena
that go unnoticed, but which, when combined or abstracted in any
number of ways, have the potential to profoundly effect our
sensibilities and relationship with their sources. In the
installation "Diptych; Dialectic," for example, the shadow of a
train and its power connector is the subject of a film that was
shot as two separate "scenes", which are later projected
side-by-side as film loops with individual projectors. When
combined as a diptych, the two films create a mysterious and
painterly third form through their juxtaposition. This new form is
something of a visual "chord", dependent on the interplay between a
technological artifact and a natural environment, where the shadow
shifts and reacts to the shape of the landscape in a slow-motion,
meditative dance. As such, it underlines my interests in exploring
our definition of "landscape" as an artistic and cultural category,
in terms of how the human mind and imagination determines and is
effected by the space(s) it inhabits.
Certainly the internet and our continuing fascination with
"cyberspace" comes into play here, since these terms have provided
a peculiar aura of respect for the intangible in our lives, which
could effect how we discuss and relate to the "spiritual" as
something even further removed from whatever we may devise. One
result of these ideas in my work is exploring the notion of the
"landscape behind the landscape," where multi-dimensional spaces
merge and interact on a purposefully human-scale, technologically
lo-fi context: pencil on paper, with no extraneous tools or
computer aid save a straight edge. The forms in these landscapes
are not meant to elicit clear one-to-one analogies to "real"
landscape elements, but to function as a sort-of visual
counterpoint for how one might perceive the forces at play around us.
In the end, I'm attempting to use the complexities of the
modern world against their propensity for disjunction and spiritual
distraction. It is my hope that my work leads towards visual and
temporal experiences that take the viewer away from the depleting
aspects of the mundane, while also resituating them firmly in a
world to be celebrated for its immeasurable and mysterious beauty.
Sandy@tahgallery.com