by Lexa Funderburg
for Art Theory Seminar
Evan Penny, born in South Africa in 1953, is now a practicing sculptor in Toronto, Canada. His main materials of choice for his larger-than-life-size hyperrealistic sculptures include silicon, pigments, hair, and aluminum. However, in the midst of his hyper-realism, Penny has a continuing motif of distortion, conjuring the sensibilities that Julia Kristeva drums up in her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1980). The intrigue of Evan Penny’s artwork struck me a number of years ago upon having the privilege of seeing his piece “Back of Kelly” (2005) mounted on a museum wall. At this point in my life I was not aware of the theories put forth by the likes of Freud, Lacan, or most importantly, Kristeva, but upon retrospection, my lingering curiosity has much to do with the concept of abjection. Evan Penny explores the boundary of abjection through his hyper-realistic and often distorted sculptures of the human figure. Penny has a keen ability to present the viewer with signs of a form that are immediately recognizable as human, but twists this perception to reach a state of uncomfortable visual skewing.
“Back of Kelly” (2005) was a work from a larger exhibition called “No One—In Particular” which featured multiple sculptures of the same style. When standing in front of the sculpture, the viewer witnesses a cropped body—from the top of the head to a few inches below the shoulders--that is nearly indiscernible from a view that you may have at a public pool. Uncovered, blemished, veiny, and hairy skin is set at eye level. As one begins to rotate around the mounted piece (as much as they are able to) they begin to realize that the form has been distorted. The full face of Kelly does not exist, as the form has been squished, not all the way to flattening, but enough to confuse the interpretation that one's eyes struggle to take in, especially in a room of white walls, neutral floors, and many a flat artwork. Penny restricts the perspective the work can be viewed from, creating tension in the viewer that is trying to connect with the piece through the most expressive and recognizable form of the human face.
The use of distortion here is subtle in comparison to his later pieces such as “Self Stretch” (2012) and “Jim Revisited” (2011), where he pushes the viewer in an even more unfamiliar visual situation that would be apt for a room of funhouse mirrors. Penny’s work certainly falls under the category of “uncanny” (as defined by Freud, via Kristeva) as the sculptures are familiar, but slightly unsettling. In a press release by his representing gallery, TrépanierBaer Gallery, it is stated that, “[his] sculptures...are firmly rooted in the artist’s longstanding interest in the human body and how viewers perceive their relationship with themselves and others...and can be described as meditations on the many conditions of being human” (TrépanierBaer, 2017).
Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-French philosopher, was crucial to the development of classifying abject art. Kristeva first explains abjection in her essay as being neither a subject or an object, but more of a state of being in opposition to something that an audience is experiencing. It is here where one may begin to see the connection between Kristeva’s words and Penny’s work. “A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been...now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing” (2). The previously discussed uncanniness of Penny’s art, in this light, is not something to be overlooked. The aforementioned tension between the viewer and the piece is solidified with this statement of Kristeva’s. There is a certain distancing that occurs which makes the object unrecognizable, which Kristeva develops on later in her section on “The Abjection of Self.” The disconnect that Penny’s work pushes can be reasoned with her statement that “essentially different from ‘uncanniness’...abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin” (4).
In this case, “kin” refers to the subject of Kelly. While the viewer may be able to see similarities, the full recognition is lost in the inability to make contact with the subject’s most recognizable part of the body, the face. This is complicated by the viewer’s ability to have some familiarity of the figure when “Back of Kelly” is viewed straight on. In the section of her book titled “Before the Beginning: Separation,” Kristeva points out the often confusing ebb and flow that the abject offers to encounterers “repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting” (8). This relates to Penny’s work in that it has the ability to draw in the viewer, but it is doing the work of repelling the viewer from itself through its bodily distortion. The viewer strains themselves in the attempt to fully grasp the visual at hand and is consistently pushed away. Kristeva later explains that in this behavior of the work, “the object ceases to be circumscribed, reasoned with, thrust aside: it appears as abject” (9). Penny’s work is dealing with the boundary between the exalted and the improper, or abject, which through this essay, I have detailed the difficulty in reasoning with the piece from the perspective of the viewer.
Evan Penny is not a household name, but his work is deserving of being one. Penny is an accessible stepping-stone to begin unpacking more intense, violent, and repulsive work that is often associated with the categorization of abject art (think of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled (#190)). His work gives the viewer the starting point of a familiar human skin, and tears down that ability to connect with the piece as one spends more time viewing it. This sort of bodily skewing has been adopted by a number of artists, but none so seemingly well as Penny, who has been working in this style since the 1990s. Ultimately, his work is “condemned...at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable: abject,” (Kristeva 11) and invites the viewer to think more deeply about their connection to their body and how it is perceived.
Works Cited
“Approaching Abjection.” Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, by Julia Kristeva, Columbia University Press, 1982, pp. 1–31.
“Evan Penny: Ask Your Body.” TrépanierBaer Gallery, 1 Mar. 2017.
Sherman, Cindy. Untitled (#190). Los Angeles, 1989.
Penny, Evan. Back of Kelly. 2005.