Mixed Doubles: The Evan Penny Gift

Every realist figurative sculpture has its implied double in the model for the work. Every ID photo or photographic portrait has a double in its sitter. The Toronto artist Evan Penny complicates such equivalences when he pairs standing nude figures in a single sculpture or makes a head-and-shoulders portrait photograph of a sculptural bust. These, too, are instances of doubling. The principle adheres in the conceptual basis for all of Penny’s work in which sculpture and photography together enlarge the discussion of what is real and what is unreal, and how we see ourselves and each other. 

Mixed Doubles: The Evan Penny Gift will explore these and other ideas, including doppelgangers and the uncanny, in an exhibition that will include all eleven works that Penny donated to the Art Gallery of Windsor in 2015, plus the sculpture No One-In Particular #3, Series 1 (2001) acquired earlier by the Gallery.

Evan Penny is a graduate of the Alberta College of Art (now the Alberta University of the Arts). He has the taught at the Alberta College of Art and Design, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago,

the Ontario College of Art, Toronto and the Toronto School of Art. He has shown extensively in Canada, the United States and Europe. In 2011, Penny was the subject of a major international exhibition Evan Penny RE FIGURED, which was shown in Germany, Austria and Italy and in Canada at the Art Gallery of Ontario. His most recent international solo exhibition was held in Chiesa di San Samuele, Venice, Italy in 2017.

Mixed Doubles: The Evan Penny Gift is guest curated by Nancy Tousley, an art critic and independent curator based in Calgary, who is the 2011 recipient of the Governor General’s Award in the Visual and Media Arts for distinguished contribution to art in Canada.