According to Webster, sleight of hand refers to a "skill with the hands so as to confuse those watching, as in doing magic tricks . . . ." The artists Holly Laws and Larimer Richards rely on such a device of "trickery or magic" to point to the deceptive and illusionary aspects of art that are never fully graspable, but rather implied.

Holly Laws's installation LIMN is comprised of small, disembodied wooden legs decked out in elaborately crafted shoes (she learned to make cowboy boots in Oklahoma). Combining the methods of woodworking with sewing, beading, and decorative patterning, Laws created twenty pairs of limbs, the shoes and stockings of each recalling the style of a different historical period. Suspended from the ceiling on wires and just touching a large table, the limbs evoke body movements, strike different poses, seem to dance and strut across the surface of the table. At once amusing and disconcerting, these fragmented body parts look like animated puppets coming to life. Essentially, they are bodies, without bodies, whose physical posture reveals their inner moods.

Larimer Richards is a trickster–the creator of installations (videos projected onto objects and sculpture) which fool the eye and entertain the spirit. In Still Life with Mirror the viewer encounters a mirror upon a small tabletop. Reflected in the mirror, we see a figure, pacing back and forth. But, as in a dream or by magic, the figure exists only in the mirror; there is no corporal equivalent. (Richards creates this illusion by videotaping the event, painting the objects–table, mirror, etc.–white, and projecting the video back onto the objects.) In a more tranquil work, Particle Wave, ocean waves roll gently over pebbles, inside the open drawer of a small table. The pebbles are real; the waves a projection. Richards creates environments or situations that allude to both constant and changing aspects of life. Whereas some works are based on repetitive action (Still Life with Mirror and Hand Model's Hands), others explore the duration of time (Night Light and Particle Wave). The former are poetic, meditative, and even nostalgic; the latter playful, humorous, and entertaining.

Both artists use the strategies of staging and fragmentation to construct spaces of spectacle. In doing so, they play with the notion of illusion or magic in art, directing viewers to that which is implied or absent rather than to that which is given, and thus question the borders between fiction and reality.

Holly Laws studied art at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA, and at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in Philadelphia, PA, where she received a MFA degree in sculpture. Most recently, she has shown her works at Centercity Contemporary Arts and AS220 Gallery in Providence, and at La MaMa Galleria in New York City. In addition, she has been involved in performance art and puppet theater as a writer, director, and performer, including her live performance I Wanna Boy With Feathers: Part II, featured at the Perishable Theater in Providence in 1999. This year, she received a Rhode Island State Council on the Arts Fellowship.

Larimer Richards studied sculpture at the Massachusetts College of Art and later received a MFA degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. He has shown his work extensively in east coast galleries, including the Massachusetts College of Art and Bernard Toale Gallery in Boston, the Fuller Museum of Art in Brockton, MA, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, and the Thread Waxing Space and the Sculpture Center in New York City. His work is also in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the DeCordova Museum.

Partial funding for LIMN was provided by the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.