Holly King (born 1957) is a Canadian artist based in Montreal, known for her photographs of constructed landscapes. She views landscape as a product of the imagination.

Career

For thirty years, Holly King has been making meticulously staged images from miniature theaters, groups of small sculptures composed of plants in the foreground, paintings as a backdrop and cleverly reflected lighting, to give rise, once photographed, to large-scale landscapes through which King hopes to reveal the beautiful and sublime. For the last 10 years, King has moved back and forth between constructed images to images of real places and back again. She sometimes added machine elements or constructed small still life subjects from plants. King studied visual arts at Laval University, where she earned her BFA in 1979. She then studied visual arts and modern dance at York University, completing her MFA in 1981. The Canadian Centre of Contemporary Photography organized a travelling show of her photography in 1998. In 2016, Linda Jansma curated a travelling mid-career

retrospective A retrospective (from Latin ''retrospectare'', "look back"), generally, is a look back at events that took place, or works that were produced, in the past. As a noun, ''retrospective'' has specific meanings in medicine, software development, popu ...

of her work for the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ontario, titled ''Holly King: Edging Towards the Mysterious''. It showed the last 10 years of her work, both constructions and her more recent "viewing boxes". King has been teaching at Concordia University in Montreal since 1983.

Collections

Her work is included in the collections of the

Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec The Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec ( en, National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec), abbreviated as MNBAQ, is an art museum in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. The museum is situated in Battlefield Park and is a complex consisting of four bui ...

, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts the Robert McLaughlin Gallery,

Concordia University Concordia University ( French: ''Université Concordia'') is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1974 following the merger of Loyola College and Sir George Williams University, Concordia is one of the t ...

, and the National Gallery of Canada

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:King, Holly Living people 1957 births 20th-century Canadian women artists 21st-century Canadian women artists Canadian women photographers 20th-century Canadian photographers