Opening Reception: Friday, November 7
Artist's Lecture, 5:30 pm
Reception to follow

The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye is a mid-career survey of the work of sculptor Elizabeth King. King makes meticulously crafted objects that raise questions about life and artifice, and the nature of being. Her uncanny self-portraits, articulated arms, artificial eyes, and tissue samples are created in a range of natural materials: from porcelain, wood, bronze, and basalt to kidskin, and human hair and eye lashes. King often exhibits this work with strange and clever viewing devises and stop-frame film animation in installations that blur the boundary between actual and virtual space. Intimate in scale—she speaks of a theater for an audience of one—and distinquished by a level of craft that solicits close viewing, the work reflects the artist's interest in early clockwork automata, the history of the mannequin and the puppet, and a host of literature in which inanimate or artificial figures come to life.

The exhibition includes 65 sculptures, film animations, installation pieces, drawings, and photographs produced since the late 1970s. Significant early pieces, major works on loan from public and private collections, and new sculpture and animation are on view in the main gallery, with a survey of studio objects made or collected over many years—figure studies, wax models, life casts, antique mannequins, glass eyes—in the lobby.

Born in 1950 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, King received BFA and MFA degrees in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1985 she joined the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University, where she currently serves as School of Arts Research Professor in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media.

Awards recognizing King's accomplishments include a 2006 Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a 2002-03 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 1996-97 Fellowship in the Visual Arts at the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Harvard. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Viginia Museum of Fine Arts.

King's work was included in Brides of Frankenstein at San Jose Museum of Art, Beyond Real: Surrealist Photography and Sculpture at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Endless Love at DC Moore Gallery, NY, and All the More Real, curated by painter Eric Fischl for the Parrish Art Museum Southampton, NY.

Elizabeth King: The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye was organized by the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Virginia, with generous support from the School of the Arts Dean's Faculty Research Grant Program and the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonweath University, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and numerous individuals.