Trust, 15 in. (38 cm) in height, slip-cast ceramic with commercial glazes and decals, multiple low firings to Cone 06 and 018, 2006, $600.
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Sugar and Spice, 10 in. (25 cm) in height, slip-cast and handbuilt ceramic with commercial glazes and decals, multiple low firings to Cone 06 and 018, 2006, $600.
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Punch Me I Am a Liberal, 16 in. (41 cm) in height, slip-cast, thrown and handbuilt ceramic, multiple low firings to Cone 06, 2005, $600.
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Painful Truths:
The Art of Greg Penner
by Braden Frieder
First, you come closer. Greg Penner’s small ceramic sculptures pull you across the room with their bright, shiny surfaces and saturated colors, which the artist calls luscious, as if he were describing candy. Memories waft up, of porcelain dolls kept safe behind glass doors in grandma’s kitchen, or wallpaper images in a room where you slept as a child. Hovering somewhere between fine art and kitsch, Penner’s images seem cute, comical and playfully absurd. Then you realize all is not well here.
Psychological self-portraiture has a long established place in the history of art. Renaissance masters left confident, positive images of themselves to posterity. Modern artists, beginning with Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, produced more disturbing (or, at least, more honest) self-portraits. Much of recent feminist art is concerned with women’s bodies and self-image, though relatively little contemporary art addresses the barrage of media images aimed at men, and the negative effects they have on male self-esteem. Expression of self in ceramic art, Penner notes, is still more limited. Penner explores fallibility and self-contempt regarding masculine self-image through ceramic sculpture and found objects. “Popular culture, especially through mass media like television and film, is sending ever stronger messages to men regarding their appearance, or subsequently, their deficiencies in appearance,” says Penner. “An efficient means to explore issues involving social and popular contemporary culture is the integration of found objects into art—objects produced for mass consumption.”
Penner’s work is catching on fast. Beginning with regional exhibitions in his native Kentucky, Penner has shown in fourteen group exhibitions throughout the Appalachian region, Ohio and Missouri last year alone, including the “21st Greater Midwest International Exhibition,” a major venue featuring the work of contemporary ceramics artists from around the world. Penner’s recent work recalls Canadian potter Wendy Walgate’s glossy assemblages of toylike animals and the illustrated ceramic mannequins of Anita Powell (another emerging artist on the ceramic art scene), though Penner’s aesthetic goals are more offbeat.
Penner’s work also suggests the Neo-Pop sculpture of Jeff Koons, whose “hands off” designer approach to making art interests Penner. Like Koons, Penner is inspired by vernacular objects made for commercial consumption, though Penner will typically produce a series of smaller figures based on a central idea. The Punch Me series combines handmade bodies with slip castings of found objects for heads and feet. Short snippets of text relate each sculpture to a separate and painful personal experience. The figures seem to invite masochistic abuse, though the prickly spines are a warning to keep away, like ancient talismans against the evil eye. Penner’s latest series introduces a set of childlike figures who unmask themselves, as if in response to personal experiences involving conflict, and ultimately resolution. Penner’s self examination, though painful, compels male viewers to confront roles we are often forced into, but seldom comfortable with: vulnerable, petulant or accident-prone.
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Monthly Method: Cast-offs and Slip Casts
As a trained
craftsman, Penner knows how to mix glazes, clay bodies and slip bodies,
but he prefers to use premade or manufactured materials wherever
possible. This, he asserts, is an integral part of his current
aesthetic, which is shaped by commercial objects and mass production.
The
next step is to find objects from which to make molds. These are then
cast and assembled into a figure. Penner is an avid collector of
bric-a-brac, and browses auctions or the listings on eBay until he
comes across a suitable object: a doll’s head, body part or some other
shape that intrigues him.
For his latest series, the bodies of
the dolls were made from highway emergency cones. The lower sections
were removed, and an ordinary kitchen bowl was attached to the bottom.
Penner uses Bondo (used by vintage auto enthusiasts to repair car
bodies) to smooth over the joint, then fills the bowl with sand or a
type of spray-foam insulation called Great Stuff. From these he makes a
regular two-part mold for slip casting. The bodies of the Punch Me dolls were first thrown on a wheel using low-fire clay, then mounted on
a Giffin Grip and turned to create collars, disks, and so forth. Penner
also buys commercial molds for some of his projects, though he will
often manipulate these to achieve a desired effect. He estimates he
makes about fifty percent of a figure himself, with the other fifty
percent obtained from commercial sources, depending on his needs for a
particular project. His ultimate goal is to create a series of
collectable multiples, suggesting industrially manufactured objects. |
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I Eat Meat, 15 in. (41 cm) in height, slip-cast ceramic with
commercial glazes and decals, multiple low firings to Cone 06 and 018,
2006, $600, by Greg Penner, Morehead, Kentucky.
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