KATHLEEN KING
VEXED INSURRECTION
Dream Farm Commons Annex
February 15 – March 22, 2025
There have been many iterations of the series of stacked plastic sculptures that Kathleen King calls Monuments to the Precariat. In VEXED INSURRECTION, King’s current installation at Dream Farm Commons Annex, the storefront space is filled with these spires, with the addition of tied fabric springing from their tops and coiling into nests on the floor. Contradictions exist between the nests, spires, and their linkages. The materials feel troubling. Discarded plastics and fabrics are artifacts of colonial/capitalist waste culture. They are residues of our intimate exchanges and the exhaustion of our daily lives. Rather than discarding these materials, King uses them to intuitively map the creation of new existences that support life, believing that the forces of these uncertainties can help us to find our balance in an increasingly cruel world.
The installation is inspired by Spheres of Insurrection: Notes on Decolonizing the Unconscious by Suely Rolnik, a book that was read and discussed in the Rad Fem reading group that meets at Dream Farm Commons. To quote Rolnick:
“The possibility of constituting fields favorable for the emergence of an ‘event’ – which is to say the emergence of an effective transfiguration in the fabric of society – hinges upon collective reappropriations of the drive. Thus conceived, an event is the result of the germination of embryonic worlds that resonate across bodies and lead those bodies to unite, producing a birthing nest for other modes of existence and for their respective cartographies.”
KATHLEEN KING is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist who makes assemblages, sculptures, and installations out of materials gathered from the waste stream. King reflects on states of coexistence, contingency, and control in what becomes apparent from the things we discard. She challenges viewers to look at abandonment as both a material and a spiritual condition and to think about how our satisfactions and consumptions are linked to global climate catastrophe. Contact her at kittyking@yahoo.com.
DREAM FARM COMMONS is an artist-run gallery, exhibition and project space located at 15th and Webster in Downtown Oakland. Our mission is to engage with the visual, the poetic, the neighborhood and the future. We build social practice projects, deep visual narratives, pop up services, and performative projects as we relentlessly pursue future imaginaries, celestial mystery, discourse and alternative economic and ecologic systems. The new annex site is at 341 15th Street, two doors down from our main exhibition space. Formerly Ricky’s Tribune Barber Shop, located in Oakland for over 50 years, first in the Tribune Building on 13th Street and then later in our building on 15th Street, it was run by the ever-kind, ever-diligent Ricky Ramirez of Oakland, who is greatly missed after his passing.