In the Galleries
Head Trip
Hyperrealist sculptor Evan Penny tackles artificial life
Many a jaw has dropped in the presence of Evan Penny’s sculptures, which replicate a host of human faces and bodies—every pore, every hair, every ripple of cellulite—with painstaking accuracy. Yet the South African–born, Toronto-based artist, who also worked as the key sculptor on such films as X-Men II and Existenz, is not a textbook naturalist. His No One—In Particular series, which debuted at Barcelona’s Galeria Segovia Isaacs in 2003, consists of silicone busts that are, in fact, composites of anonymous facial features culled from a variety of sources—including magazines and Penny’s own imagination—and digitally manipulated. The works are rendered in skewed dimensions that reduce their depth to as shallow as 13 centimetres and slightly enlarge their heads. His chromogenic prints of these sculptures, seen here, provide an extra layer of intrigue to the project: all figures are captured head-on, their flatness cleverly disguised. Penny’s fake subjects become creepily real, their artificiality washed away by the slick inhumanity of the two-dimensional image.
Artwork $3,500–$6,000. April 28 to May 26. Birch Libralato, 129 Tecumseth St., 416-365-3003.
TEST Originally published April 2007
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