In an unsettled era of platitudes and catchphrases, Eleanor King’s work speaks for itself. While currently residing and working in New York, she now returns to her old stomping ground in Halifax/Kjipuktuk to present a new exhibition at Katzman Art Projects (formerly Studio 21). On display until October 3rd, HIVEMIND is a rallying cry in full colour.

Working with myriad mediums (oil, acrylic, flashe, watercolour and ink; on paper, canvas, and wood) in dialogue through unexpected moments of texture or gloss, King’s process is rendered before our eyes, revealed in moments of dirtiness, drips, and smudges. Works on paper unselfconsciously expose their own pencilled-in planning marks, giving pseudo-mockups pride of place as autonomous works. Materiality is centred, undisguised, each piece refusing to obfuscate the reality of their making. We are reminded that even in the midst of meticulously hand-filled straight lines, art-making— like life, or political reform, or anything worthwhile— is fundamentally a little messy.

King has referred to an internal battle between her artistic perfectionism and political fire, fearing these elements could be at odds. In this collection, we get to see a looseness demonstrating some mode of peace, using beauty she tells me as a “strategic practice.” There is a kind of tug-of-war in the doubled-up text, with funky intersections producing an eye-jittering effect, like the dazzle camouflage portrayed by Arthur Lismer (you can take the artist out of Nova Scotia, but…). The convergence of lines pulls King’s phrases (HIVE/MIND/DEMOC/RACY, SINGLE USE PLASTIC) into a splintered collision emanating from imaginary space, shattering in a riot of colour.

King’s chosen phrases stake new ground somewhere between Jenny Holzer and Robert Indiana, spanning urgent protest signs and cheeky home decor: Rent Strike (Now!), Live Laugh Love, No Jerks, Tonight’s the Night, FUCK YR WAR. NOTHING NOT is painted directly on the gallery’s pristine white wall, the thought completed on a canvas reading FOR SALE, hung in a perfectly aligned slant. Making use of angles, she renders the so-called white cube askew, even as she creates some of her most commercially viable works to date. By necessity, most of the works in this collection are smaller and more portable than her typical output. With a background as a sculptor/installation artist, King is most comfortable working within site specific confines. Her studio became her primary creative locus during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, where she was able to engage in her “anxious meditations” of line and purpose uninterrupted before re-emerging into the world, paintings in hand. Staking out their new territory, King has situated this exhibition with grounding elements repurposed from her studio space: stray paint cans, brushes, and even a drumstick (nodding to the musical side of her practice – King is a drummer and has been in many bands). Indeed, the tension used to hold her past sculptures together in their prescribed forms within the confines of specific sites is adapted here within the four sides of her ready-made canvases and papers.

Though this collection diverts towards more traditional media, King has not abandoned her roots. Tucked into a small alcove at the rear of the gallery the installation NO SIGNAL picks up King’s thread of interest in perpetual technological obsolescence. Clunky monitors intermittently reveal the text “no signal” as it enters view from behind taped-off areas of their screens; old low frequency radios hung on the wall emit liminal white noise; and a retro portable television displays lines of static; all set up before a mirror, doubled up, confronting themselves. Analog static is partly an errant remnant of the Big Bang, offering some contact with our origins in hope to recover answers for the future.

Converting a previous freestanding project constructed from repurposed bee boxes, HIVEMIND/MINDHIVE has been split to fit flush on a corner wall extending to the ceiling, maintaining King’s output of monumental ready-made stacks. The scale and confident graphic quality demands attention from first glance, turning heads to investigate the crosscutting titular text running it’s length. As in HIVE/MIND/DEMOC/RACY (multi-media on canvas), King explores the intersection of the natural world (undergoing the climate emergency) and politics, seeking to reapply “swarm intelligence” to our own failing systems.

As King engaged in the laborious and meditative process of delicately measuring and marking, making use of available readymade canvases, she considered if these art practices felt justified in a context of ongoing global emergencies demanding action. The work on show here plays in distortion, in catching a thought right at the decisive moment, in seeing the forest and the trees. Interpreting King’s obscured visual language emulates the cognitive process of approaching a conclusion through the tangle of conflicting feelings. As we encounter works of increasing complexity, we try to read as the axes gradually lean further into their divided angles, becoming confused. It’s as if we’re being trained to see, building up our capacity for attention in the face of illegibility. It may be that in the end, the direction and strength of our collective attention will be the commodity that determines the feasibility of our communal survival.