Reviews of Attention's Loop

"An intellectual self-portrait as tightly controlled as a puppet on a string, Attention's Loop is an accomplished, erudite, and surprisingly satisfying performance." Nancy Princenthal, Art On Paper, September-October, 1999

"And while there may not be an obvious sequence in the ordering of these pieces... as the book progresses, King's individual pages begin to speak to one another. Whether she's musing on Grimm's fairy tale character Tom Thumb, on Adelard of Bath (1116-42) and his theory of visual perception, or on how a child's eyes might look at the precise instant they cease paying attention and slip into daydream, subjects begin to double back on one another with a kind of organic logic. ... Attention's Loop warrants multiple readings. At first you may give yourself over to King's musings in a kind of blind faith, merely enjoying the music of her language, the broad range of her reference. Then all of a sudden, in one nondescript sentence, a facet of her vision becomes crystal clear." Rynn Williams, Graphis, July-August, 1999

"King's ruminations rhythmically loop from topic to topic and back again, dropping strands of thought only to pick them up later. ... The style is fascinating, the images beautiful and strange, and the combination of the two mesmerizing." Punchline, May, 1999

"One theme that figures extensively in Attention's Loop is the externalization and embodiment of thought... [which] seems to provide the raison d'être for King's sculpture as well as her writing. Both are externalizations of the artist's attempts to reflect on the self -- her own self and a more general human one. ...invoking the rich lore that surrounds human doubles from medieval times to the present...King turns the quest back on itself, focusing on the perennial desire for and elaborate processes used to construct such beings, in doing so revealing the underlying motives for the quest." Chris Gilbert, New Art Examiner, November 1999

"...the passages devoted to describing the interaction between eye, mind and hand in the studio as work is made... are some of the most striking sections of the text, setting up resonances for the visual and narrative impulses which surround them. Here, in the processes of making -- making the 'self,' making 'art,' making the self as art -- the loops of the volume are able to correspond, reiterate and open outward... Attention's Loop is a volume which does many things well." Marsha Meskimmon, Loughborough University, UK

"This gorgeous volume should be of great interest to puppetophiles; consideration of the coexistence of substance and spirit is at the very core of puppetry. In this extended rumination on perception, '...size, dirt, artifice, work, and eye' are chewed over in what the author calls a play of overlapping loops. Fittingly, the book itself is a series of loops, whose turns are sources of both light and delight." Andrew Periale, Editor, Puppetry International, Fall 1999

"The diminutive figures also evoke the tiny reflection one sees of oneself mirrored in the dark center of another's eye, which King mentions in the book, in her discussion of the etymologies of the word "pupil." "Memory itself changes the size of a thing," she writes, and photographs, too, "seldom deliver things in their actual sizes." The discrepancy in both scale and substance between her sculptures, the photographs of them and the human forms they are modeled after initiates a delicious friction. Illusion rubs up seductively against artifice, and artifice insinuates itself into illusion, setting in motion another perceptual loop. But that rhythm of giving in (to either artifice or reality) and being pulled back (by the other) -- the internal machinations of the theater audience -- doesn't form as neat a circle as that made by joining thumb to forefinger. The mind's path is fruitfully interrupted, indeed defined by interruption and the unexpected. Instead of delivering the certainty of a closed loop, King's work generates an exhilarating spiral of thought that continually closes in on and teases out the elusive truths at its core." Leah Ollman, Art in America, October, 2000