The Sheldon Art Museum surveys the Works of Elizabeth King

Written by Tabatha Ryckman Sunday, 14 August 2011 21:42

LINCOLN, NE - A mid-career survey, The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye presents approximately 65 sculptures, film animations, installations, drawings and photographs by Elizabeth King . On exhibit at The Sheldon Art Museum through 12 October, 2008.

King 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 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.

In a review of the exhibition in the March/April issue of Art Papers, Dinah Ryan wrote: "Enter The Sizes of Things in the Mind's Eye ... as if entering a lapidary dream in which, everywhere you turn, the same face swims out of dimness into pools of stark illumination. It is an open face, precisely rendered in porcelain or bronze, with nimble brow, a pursed, quizzical mouth, and round, curious eyes tilting in sadness or perplexity or, sometimes, closing in resigned endurance.

" ... A yearning that overwhelms emotion unites King's work: a powerful and almost fantastic sense of longing, sadness, and isolation. You almost flinch rather than look too penetratingly at the private, lonely feeling turned outward by these sculptures. You begin to imagine stories, as in a fairytale: a small child dreamily investing particular things with magical, animate properties."

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 the Arts Research Professor in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media. Last year work was the subject of a solo show at New York's Kent Gallery.

 The artist will speak about her work at Sheldon twice during the exhibition. She will give a casual gallery talk at the exhibition’s opening on Friday, July 18, at 5:30 p.m., and she will give a lecture about her work in Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium at 2 p.m. on Friday, October 10. Both events are free and open to the public.

The exhibition was organized by the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, Virginia, with support from the School of the Arts Dean's Faculty Research Grant Program and the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, Kent Gallery and numerous individuals.

The Sheldon, located at 12th and R Streets on the UNL City Campus, is open to the public Tuesday through Sunday. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, and noon to 5 p.m. on Sunday. For information or to arrange a tour, please call (402) 472-2461. Additional information is also available on the Sheldon Web site, www.sheldon.unl.edu .

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