Evan Penny peels back our selves with unsettling exploration of Greek myth and the alienation of AI | Canada Voices

For several years, Canadian sculptor Evan Penny has considered the Greek myth of Marsyas, the satyr who challenged Apollo to a musical contest and lost. His punishment was to be flayed alive by the god and, as he suffered, he was said to cry out: “Why do you peel me from myself?”

Perhaps the myth is a cautionary tale about hubris, in particular the artistic variety that might tempt a lesser being to mimic divine creation. Christian art has found in the myth an intriguing reversal of the Crucifixion, a god torturing a mortal rather than mortals torturing a god.

Yet what has captured Penny’s attention is Marsyas’s cry, suggesting a body witnessing his own skin peeled back from the muscle and bone, a cleaving of or separation from the self. Is there not in that some violent metaphor for our current imagistic alienations: the grotesqueries of AI or the seduction of the selfie?

In recent sculptural and photographic work, Penny explores that idea. At the Blouin Division Gallery in Toronto, Penny’s dealer, the TrépanierBaer gallery of Calgary, has organized a retrospective of the past decade’s work. It begins with a hyper-realistic sculpture of the horned and bearded Marsyas, hanging by his bound hands, one arm already missing its skin, every hair on his goat-like legs and cloven hooves observed. It continues with distorted portraits of the satyr in which the rippling reflections of an uneven mirrored surface have been used to produce a milky swirl of imagery that includes the back of a flesh-coloured cellphone, the eye of its camera clearly visible.

Penny has been well recognized for his provocative approach to portraiture and figurative sculpture: his highly realistic three-dimensional renditions of faces or bodies distorted by extreme perspective or fun-house mirror reflections. His method of taking effects you might achieve mucking about with Photoshop and painstakingly turning them into actual mannequins is not merely clever, it destabilizes the viewer and forces them to reconsider scale, media and representation. This show includes several works where Penny creates what looks like a stone sculpture yet punctuates it with what looks like real hair, asking us to consider how marble can possibly represent human flesh.

But that is just for starters. Since the 2010s, Penny has begun to place his work in the context of art history and to include cultural references such as the Marsyas myth. Take, for example, the weirdly elongated dead Christ, Homage to Holbein, included in this show, a long horizontal relief sculpture in the style of a historic painting. It is a reference to two historical works by the Renaissance portraitist Hans Holbein: his unusual horizonal painting of the dead Christ in the tomb, and The Ambassadors, the famous portrait with a severely distorted skull that can only be understood if one views the canvas from a sharp side angle.

In another work, Self Portrait after Géricault’s Fragments Anatomiques, Penny begins with a gory anatomical painting by the early 19th century French artist Théodore Géricault featuring an amputated arm and shoulder, and a leg with one skinless section revealing musculature. Penny fashions a three-dimensional sculpture of the limbs, but at something larger than a natural human scale. The oversized body parts lie on what appears to be a hard stone base, except that they dent it, as though it were a pillow.

When the Art Gallery of Alberta organized a show for Penny at the 2017 Venice Biennale, it was this kind of work he exhibited, including the Marsyas sculptures. He came home with a Venetian mirror, a large item in a gilt frame with aging glass, all the better to reflect poor Marsyas.

This show, titled Marsyas and the Venetian Mirror, follows Penny’s progress from there and perhaps it’s no surprise that an artist interested in distorting or disrupting figurative imagery is now experimenting with AI. Feeding the prompts “Evan Penny sculpture,” “Flaying of Marsyas” and “Venetian mirror” into an image-generator, Penny has produced photographic images in which a more-or-less distorted gilt sculpture of a satyr emerges from a disintegrating gilt frame. Following his usual procedure, Penny has then created actual sculptures based on these images, odd gilt reliefs where the tortured satyr erupts from the frame.

AI-generated imagery produces an eerily unnatural aesthetic at the best of times and, coupled with the swirling portraits of Marsyas and the cellphone, the effect of the most recent work is unsettling. There has always been a hint of the grotesque in Penny’s work but now he embraces that direction, probing yet deeper in a career-long investigation of how to represent the human figure.

Marsayas and the Venetian Mirror continues at the Blouin Division Gallery, 45 Ernest Ave., Toronto to Oct. 26.