“Chasing Shadows: The Magical Realities of Elly MacKay” showcases the artist and illustrator’s miniature shadow theatres, prints, original hand-cut renderings, curiosity cabinets and a large-scale site-specific installation created for Longwood Center for Visual Arts’ Main Street gallery.

“Chasing Shadows” includes new work, including a large-scale kinetic installation created specifically for LCVA’s 30-foot-long Main Street window gallery.

“Chasing Shadows” is the first in a new annual exhibition series organized around the Virginia Children’s Book Festival.

MacKay will return to the LCVA in October to lead workshops during the Virginia Children’s Book Festival. A section of the exhibition also features MacKay’s rarely exhibited simple theatre boxes. MacKay is the first to characterize her work as play, a practice that is very evident here.

The exhibition and related programming are made possible through the generosity of Candice Jamison Dowdy ’69 and Charles H. Dowdy III, Northwestern Mutual, the Sansom Foundation, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and Yupo Synthetic Paper.

The opening reception for Chasing Shadows will take place on Friday, July 8, from 5-8 p.m.

The exhibition will remain on display through Nov. 6.