Evan Penny's sculptural distortions of truth, currently on display at the Art Gallery of Algoma, explore the subtle territory between reality and exaggeration.
A Torontonian hailed as one of the leading sculptors of the postmodern era, Penny warps expectations in his process.
Stretch (shown with the artist) is an example of his anamorphic works.
Penny often works from photographs and other two-dimensional images that he distorts into big clay models of face and bust that are then cast in epoxy and detailed with hair and eyelash implants.
But in the case of the work shown, he ran the distortion in his head instead of on a computer.
"One would expect that what I did was PhotoShop somebody's face and stretch it, then do the sculpture based on that," Penny says.
"But it's really the other way around. I conceived the sculpture in the stretched state and then did a photograph of the stretch and compressed the photograph."
The photograph Penny refers to can be seen beside the sculpture that spawned it at Art Gallery of Algoma until July 2. where a collection of Penny's hyper-realistic unsettlingly-distorted sculptures went on display this week.
"The work really is about this kind of expectation we have in relationship to the photograph or our image in the photograph," he says.
The show, called Absolutely Unreal features obviously anamorphic as well as more representational sculptures and photographs of sculptures.
The exhibition has been organized by Museum London and will be circulating across Canada
"A lot of people really key into what I think is one of the real impulses in the work which is this kind of relationship we have to our own images in two dimensional technologies like photographs, television, movies and now much more, digital surrealities," says Penny.
"The work is trying to create this moment of self consciousness where one steps back for a moment and just kind of realizes there is a disconnect here," he says. "What we assume of the sculpture or photograph here is not quite doing what it should."