Written By : Marie Clark

During an hour of careful but honest selection of thousands of words to describe her ongoing ordeal, York City artist Rita King never used the word.

Maybe she just doesn’t think it’s “unfair.” Or maybe the word is disempowering. Maybe if she had spoken the word, her story would be less compelling, more comfortably cataloged into the cliche files of Terrible Things that Happen to People Who Don’t Deserve It. And that might be a bit more palatable for those of us lucky to have been assigned, by whatever omnipotent force was dealing, childhoods that included “The Year My Parents Divorced” or “Those Hideous Braces” instead of Rita King’s ugly card, “A Brain Problem Nobody Could Figure Out.”

People don’t like invisible conditions, are scared of unseen demons that send little girls to hide in corners when they’re ten. Running to her mother when the symptoms started, Smith would feel panic emerge from a place she couldn’t control and a surreal sense would overtake her.
“I’m having déjà vu, I’m having déjà vu,” she’d say. In a fearful frenzy, she’d sit against a wall and succumb to automatisms.
Despite memory loss and confusion following the episodes, she was misdiagnosed with a panic disorder and continued to suffer bizarre involuntary behaviors for years.
So maybe “unfair” should just be implied when describing a malady that could lurk in the folds of her brain, making her think she was crazy for most of her life before a neurologist finally demystified it.

At last given a name for the condition that left much of her life gray, King said she’s also ready to stop hiding. Her recent show at The Parliament exposed her rare form of epilepsy and her perception of the physical scars of a recent operation to implant an electronic device in her chest, with similar function as a pacemaker, and wires that snake up her neck to deliver a jolt to the affected area of her brain.
What she previously hid under turtlenecks will be literally hanging on the walls. The pieces, oil paintings inspired by a series of drawings sketched on her front porch, are post-surgery catharsis.
Her interpretation, she admits, was “harsh,” with crude depiction of AA batteries lodged in her chest and another piece called “Fire in the Neck,” representing a familiar pain.
King wants the show, called Operation, to inform and help the public experience the 23-year-old’s reality, which includes a mild shock from the implant, a distracting and unpleasant sensation that tightens her vocal cords and discernably lowers her pitch of voice, every 90 seconds.
Every minute-and-a-half of every day, and she notices it almost every time it happens.
King might surprise gallery-goers with a less invasive representation of that sensation, interrupting them at the same intervals as the device.
“People think of seizures, they think of grand mals, flopping all over the floor,” she said. “People don’t understand what they can’t see.”
She still has about 15 seizures per day, unstoppable waves of abnormal brain activity that she endures largely to the oblivion of those around her when she’s teaching art or taking orders and making drinks as a Starbucks barista.
Her speech slows, and she feels extremely uncomfortable and wants to fall over where she stands. But it’s an internal experience as most people around her “just see me as fine,” she said.
While her art is the visible representation of her condition, another goal of “Operation” is to show people what’s not visible.
“I just want people to leave knowing there are more things than what they see,” she said. “There are people who have huge issues and they’re devastating.”
In the end, she said, people see what they want.
The show also includes some earlier abstract works that King said people tend to overanalyze.
Naming the paintings after the objects which inspired the geometric nonobjective exploration might have been folly, she said, because people insist they can see the object of inspiration even if it wasn’t painted into the piece. She has even turned some of  them upside down, but people still insist.
It used to drive her crazy.
“You can’t control what people see in your art,” she said. And she also knows she can’t control what they don’t see.

Written By: Marie Clark

See More of Rita’s Work at:
www.Rita-King.com