Walking into “Elizabeth King: The Sizes of Things in the Mind’s Eye” is the beginning of a captivating journey into a new world of perception, a place populated by small figures and video projections, photographs and mechanical devices, where each face appears the same but conveys different feelings and emotions each time it is seen.

On view at the Sheldon Museum of Art through Oct. 12, the exhibition is a retrospective of the multilayered, multimedia work of King, who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she serves as School of the Arts research professor in the Department of Sculpture + Extended Media.

At the center of the exhibition — and immediately visible when entering the galleries that contain the show — is “Pupil,” a 1987-2000 figure made of porcelain, glass, wood, brass and fiber optics. Marionettelike, but more sculptural and realistic in the face and hands, “Pupil” is the piece that provides the content for much of the rest of the work.

“Pupil” is small, described as “half-sized” but actually smaller — a size that King says correlates to the biological distance in which the eyes can closely focus, allowing, for example, the entire head to be precisely seen.

King’s work almost demands that kind of close viewing, the tiny eyes and carefully carved hands grabbing the attention then the mechanisms and structure of the piece changing its sensibility from an attempt at lifelike reproduction to a theatrical construction that becomes an object in and of itself.

“They’re realistic, they’re figurative, they’re lifelike, even though they’re small,” King said. “On one hand, you would look at a piece — and this is the ancient task of sculpture — to draw forth an emotional response from an image of the body. But at the same time, this is clearly artificial. The neck is slatted and jointed, you see a little of the mechanics inside the head, so the mechanics of the theater are in full view.

“So is it possible, even now, to have a convincing, even fleeting, convincing illusion of an emotional presence? That’s how I would put my central passion in the work.”

Part of the exhibition is made up of objects and preliminary studies from King’s studio — plaster casts, old marionettes, hinged paper and various small heads that provide an idea of the meticulousness and roots of her work. It takes King years to make her figures, and the refinement in that process can be seen in the difference between the skeletal metal of “Articulated Figure,” from 1981 to 1984, and the eerie beauty of “Pupil.”

“Pupil” is also the subject of a series of photographs, blown up to a far larger scale than the object itself.

That is the first point in which King begins to play with the differences in media and the emotional and visual reactions those differences create. So the photographs become not only studies in scale, but of perception — black-and-white artworks that could stand without the rest of the show. And they allow her to pose “Pupil” in multiple ways while sculpture remains static once the exhibition is set.

“I’m after a kind of tension,” King said. That tension includes the pull between the mechanical operation of the figure and its physicality and the representation of the photographs, the contrast between the various materials used to construct the sculptures and the projection of the videos of the work — which, of course, is simply light.

In 1991, King made her first film, a stop-motion animation called “What Happened?” The reaction to that piece — people were drawn to the moving picture of the sculpture rather than the object, even though the latter involved far more time and thought on the artist’s part.

“That started me on a journey to try and figure out how I could even the odds of the way in which these two languages claim our attention,” King said. “We are so wired for movement, we’ll go for the dumbest movement over the most spectacular still thing.”

So she paired a tiny projection of a moving eye with the sculpture used to create the movement in “Quizzing Glass” and then put “Barlett’s Hand” side-by-side, projecting the film next to the sculpture and framing the distance so they look ever more alike.

“What I hope will happen is that as your eye moves from the moving image to the still image, it will drag with it a little of the language of film,” she said. “And vice versa. When your eye moves from the sculpture to the film, it will drag with it, even just a few seconds of actual material presence. Can I correct the flaws of one medium with the virtues of the other?”

The large screen video and two other pieces, one of which looks like an old-fashioned camera with bellows, provide other ways to view King’s films, again altering perception through rounded lens and focal distance. To see those projections requires some effort on the part of the viewer and can’t help but raise the question, “What am I looking at?” that is also at the core of the sculptures and photographs.

“Pupil” and most of the other sculptures are self-portraits. King said she chose herself as a model because, for example, she could shave her head to see what that looked like rather than subject someone else to that process; she  would always be available when it came time to work; and no one else would be embarrassed by turning up in the work.

“I’m the only one with something to lose,” she said. “It starts out as sheer convenience. How does it end up? Because the pieces are made from the inside out, it does end up having a little bit of a sort of essential quest — Where am I in there? Where are you in there? What makes one person different from the other? There is a philosophical element that enters into it, almost inadvertently.”

Philosophical inquiries aside, King doesn’t think much about looking at herself for hours on end when she’s making the piece or when she and a team of assistants spent two weeks installing the Sheldon exhibition.

“I don’t even recognize my own face in these self-portraits; I recognize a set of angles and volumes,” King said. “But I do have an emotional response. … I must because I’m choosing one pose over another. But I depend totally on the viewer and the viewer’s behavior to let me know this is successful. I hope it’s an emotional experience. I hope these are pieces that have emotional presence of one kind or another.”

The pieces do have an emotional presence and a philosophical dimension. They also link old and new — puppetry with animation — and explore the interaction of material and media and how each changes, however subtlely, conveyed feelings and ideas.

With layer upon layer of image, object and meaning, “Elizabeth King: The Sizes of Things in the Mind’s Eye” is the most impressive solo exhibition at Sheldon in recent memory. It’s also the most transformative, taking the viewer into a world in which perception is both the question and the answer.

Reach L. Kent Wolgamott at 473-7244 or kwolgamott@journalstar.com.