Beyond Likeness: Lalla Essaydi, Anne Harris, Elizabeth King, and Jennifer Onofrio

March 27 – May 27, 2007

While all but Lalla Essaydi use their own bodies as the impetus for their art, the work in the exhibition has nothing to do with portraiture in the conventional sense. Moroccan Lalla Essaydi covers whole rooms and the women who inhabit them with calligraphy written in henna as she explores diverging concepts of Arab women.

Anne Harris draws and paints her own body as a study of gravity and inner space. In Beyond Likeness, she couples images of her mirrored self with small, exquisite paintings of her son Max, confirming, years later, his presence in forming both her interior and exterior self.

Elizabeth King, now living in Richmond, Virginia, builds porcelain manikins based in her own likeness, which she turns into remarkable mechanical wonders, glass eyes and all. They, in turn, are transformed into still photographs and shifting, moving images—odd, dreamlike, other worldly—all of which intermesh in the exhibition.

Jennifer Onofrio photographs her own body, only to pare her images to shapes and forms that invoke inhabitants of the animal kingdom. Always elegant, Onofrio’s abstract form of a shoulder blade bring to mind a breast of chicken—stripped of its skin,—or an arm bearing an uncanny likeness to a wing or a fin, posed for movement.

Installation Images