Elizabeth King at Visual Arts Center
December 7, 2007 - February 17, 2008
Opening Reception December 7, 6-8pm
True F. Luck Gallery Inaugural Exhibition features work of Sculpture professor Elizabeth King.
Organized in association with the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts, the exhibition will offer audiences an unprecedented opportunity to explore the artistic evolution and singular innovations of one of the region’s most outstanding and influential artists. King’s work has not been seen in any depth in the Richmond area for nearly two decades, which makes this show an even more eagerly anticipated event. The project will be documented in a fully illustrated catalogue.
King often combines her meticulously wrought figurative sculptures with stop-frame film animation in installations that blur the boundary between actual and virtual space. Intimate in scale and distinguished by a level of craft that solicits close viewing, this work reflects her interests in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet, and literature’s host of legends in which the inanimate or artificial figure comes to life.
The exhibition will present approximately 65 sculptures, film animations, installation pieces, drawings and photographs produced since the late 1970s, on loan from private and several public collections and from the artist herself. It will feature such seminal works as Pupil, lent by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., as well as her latest pieces, including Bartlett’s Hand, a carved wooden sculpture with movable joints that hypnotically comes to life in an accompanying animated film. Supplementing these works will be other objects from King’s studio – her glass-eye collection, wax studies of facial expressions, plaster life casts and optical devices, for example – that illuminate process and intent.
Visual Arts Center of Richmond, (804) 353-0094, 1812 West Main Street, Richmond
