Evan Penny - Reviews & Essays

David Moos: Let’s begin by talking about two of your most recent works, Young Self: Portrait of the Artist as He Was (Not) and Old Self: Portrait of the Artist as He Will (Not) Be.

Evan Penny: Pretty much all the work of the last ten years has in some way been filtered through photography or media that extends from photography, digital media such as Photoshop or 3-D scanning. The self-portraits represent an attempt to imagine myself through time, in relation to these technologies.

These works explore how we see ourselves; how we project through time and imagine ourselves in the past and in the future. They consider how much our ability to imagine is bound up in the particularities of the technologies we rely on. Our relationship to photography, for instance, significantly defines how we conceive of and remember ourselves. Not just appearances and memories but also how we construct time, the length of our life, how we bracket and frame experience. This is all bound up in the photograph.

Although I am a sculptor and work three dimensionally, for me it is all still very much related to the photographic, and in the recent projects also to 3-D scanning technologies.

For both the Young Self and Old Self pieces I started by having a 3-D digital capture done of my body. I brought with me to the scanning facility a photograph of my father and a photograph of myself as a youth. At the moment of being scanned I tried to occupy the memory of how I might have felt as the younger self in the photograph. For the other scan, I tried to imagine how I might be feeling as the older self, represented by my father’s image.

DAVID: But the scan is a scan of your body in the present tense.

EVAN: Yes, head and shoulders. It’s a scan of me as I am now. The idea of the project is about looking backwards and looking forwards and trying to imagine those outer limits of my adult life, and by implication, the space between.

DAVID: As an image?

EVAN: Right. So I wanted the young character to represent the point at which I am becoming an adult, and the older character to represent the final stage of adult life. However, because the work initiates from a scan of myself today, in my mid-fifties, the information being captured and encoded into the image is of me at this age. The work begins with an image of how I look now, and so that also defines the limits of how much manipulation and change can be imposed without losing it’s immediacy or connection to the present “photographic moment”. The negotiation with the technology is implicit in the process.

DAVID: I understand that you have always handrendered in clay from the very beginning, but that recently with the introduction of scanning, this has changed. Explain your process with this recent work, how you move from this digital image to a sculpture.

EVAN: Basically, I have the scan done, which translates to digital information that is reworked in a 3-D computer software program. That information is used to mill a three-dimensional form in urethane foam. So the initial object I am working from is a foam copy of the scan of myself.

DAVID: A 3-D prototype?

EVAN: Yes, but it’s a very rough, generalised prototype.

DAVID: This is a technology that was pioneered by engineers and machinists.

EVAN: Yes, in industry it’s for replicating parts and can be very precise. But this particular technology is designed to scan the human body, so it’s really not for that kind of use, but rather is applicable to the computer game and film industries, for scanning models and actors. Think of Avatar, for instance. The “image capture” needs to be done quickly because we move and breathe. But because the capture happens very quickly, within seconds, it’s rough information. It’s not very precise. Imagine that a two-dimensional equivalent might be a lowresolution JPEG or blurry photograph. So in order to achieve the level of detail and transformation that I need, I model and cast the foam prototype into modelling clay. Once in clay I am back in my own familiar medium and can sculpt and manipulate it to my heart’s content. So with these projects, despite the fact that I am starting from a scan, there is still an extensive sculpting process involved.

DAVID: Can you elaborate further on the limits of how much manipulation or change can be imposed?

EVAN: That depends on the nature of the project. With the new Female Stretch and Jim Revisited I stretch and skew shape dramatically. The two self-portraits are a more subtle and complex proposition. The manipulation is less with the underlying geometry or physical structure and more with the effects of aging. In both cases, with the younger and older versions of myself, I am working off a scan of myself as I am now. In the younger one, I am trying to project backwards in time to the point when I’m just developing as an adult, but then I reach a point in time where my bone structure’s not fully developed yet …

DAVID: Talk about the limit of a photograph, the limit of a scan and where your sculpture takes from that information, from that source information. And what that boundary is that may prevent you from modelling yourself as a baby, where there is very incomplete if any photographic source material.

EVAN: Right. I suppose it comes down to the recognition that the information, the records one has are incomplete or distorted. I think we are all generally aware of that. On the one hand it does leave us with a compelling impression of ourselves, which we tend to rely on very heavily. But in truth, it’s all very subjective, scanty and unreliable. It’s one of the things I’ve been spending time with in this project. Recognising that I’ve got all these images and impressions of myself that I’ve relied on over the years, and now as I’ve spent this time revisiting them, recognising just how unstable they are. I’m not the person I thought I was [laughs] …

DAVID: In what way?

EVAN: I imagine for instance when I was at a certain stage, which is this vague seventeen- to nineteen- year-old stage, really before I’ve fully left home, before I’ve really moved into my adult life, but I’m no longer a child. It’s that very difficult and sort of …

DAVID: Wide open moment?

EVAN: Wide open moment. Yeah … For example, I was also an athlete. I was a competitive swimmer. I was at my fittest ever. So I have that image of myself at that lifetime peak, having a very dynamic relationship with my body. I had always remembered that moment as my most robust, biggest, fullest, strongest. However, I realise now, looking at photographs of myself from that time, that I was still a scrawny kid. I’m still small, but I’m actually bigger now and probably much stronger. So I kind of blurred those lines …

DAVID: Is that sensation that you now recall evident in the snapshot photographs that we were just looking at?

EVAN: I think so, because what I think I was recalling back then was just a sense of internal dynamism. A sense of being very poised internally, physically. And yet over time I imagined that translated into a certain appearance I might not have had. It can go any number of ways. My memory of myself at a certain age might have been that I was troubled or very insecure or that I was unattractive or whatever. And yet when I revisit these old photos I think what the heck was wrong with me, because I was obviously a beautiful young guy with all this promise. So those memories are very fluid and subjective, and so are the photographs. Many of them are blurry, they’re just not good documentation or they’re very artificial documentation and so on. Out of all of this I form an idea of myself.

DAVID: The scan has none of the trappings of a snapshot. When looking at a snapshot of you in a Canadian winter landscape out West, in Alberta, as a young person, one can very easily imbue those personal snapshots with a narrative, unlike the objectivity of a scan. Speak about that implied content.

EVAN: Of course, with the snapshot there’s always the environment being depicted at the same time.

DAVID: But then there is the person in that environment, the way you spoke about your prior selves, your perception of your prior selves. Does the scan strip that subjectivity away? Does the scan simply become information and then it’s up to you to reinsert the narrative?

EVAN: No, not really. I do think that, just as a photograph captures a certain impression of you in the mood you’re in, any number of small inflections, which are the clues to a narrative, the scan also conveys.

DAVID: The scan is essential because it freezes the moment of looking, the glimpse of the artist observing his subject.

EVAN: This reminds me of one of the conundrums I faced in my earlier work, such as the L. Faux project, which evolved over the course of many hours with the model. While the depiction was fastidious and accurate, the mood and gesture of the subject became progressively drawn out. So the question was always, why are these things always so deadpan? Why are they so neutral? I realised the answer is precisely because of the length of time they took to realise. This is what the subject looks like “in” 400 hours, not “after” 400 hours. That long-distilled, ever-present quality was a by-product of that time frame and quite unlike the time frame of the photographic moment or that of real-time encounters. The scanning allows me to circumvent that process and address the question of portraiture in ways I haven’t been able to previously achieve.

DAVID: How do you render a likeness? I was recently looking at the sculpture of Matisse, and how his drawing practice relates to sculpture. It’s interesting how annotated, generalised and streamlined his sculptural vocabulary is, in an effort to capture and connote a pose. And how far from the likeness his work travels as he conveys an essence through stylistic accentuation. When I look at your work I realise you have found a language or method to stop time and arrest perception.

EVAN: Yes, my process is very analytical and involves progressively gathering and organising a huge amount of information into a coherent three-dimensional structure.

DAVID: What do you see when you look upon Old Self: Portrait of the Artist as He Will (Not) Be?

EVAN: [Sighs] Lots of things. I see my father, familial resemblance. Experience and worldweariness, I mean, there’s a mood in this thing that’s pretty interesting. The gaze is both immediate and long. There’s something about being in the moment with this piece. It’s someone present in their body but reflecting backwards in time.

DAVID: It’s quite existential. It’s retrospective and self-reflective. One can see that there’s a distanced view where he’s not focusing on you or I, who are two feet from him, but rather looking inward. How should one look at a sculpture like this? What’s your ideal? How do you want to experience it?

EVAN: It’s a little hard for me to say because for me it’s really been a process. It’s been a big process. Maybe not so surprisingly, my relationship to this work is quite different from my relationship to most of my other work. I tend to keep a kind of emotional distance from my work. I don’t generally get caught up in it. But these are much more personal … Because of this project my self image has changed. I feel older.

DAVID: This sculpture has made you feel older?

EVAN: Yes, the sculpture has aged me. I inhabit that image now. After all, I imagined it.

DAVID: Can you not say the same about the young self?

EVAN: Sadly, not exactly. Not yet [laughs].

DAVID: Let’s talk about tradition. One can think about sculpture in history and monumental works. But where do you make links between this work, this old self, and works in the history of art? When you’re conceiving the project, but then also when you’re actually working on these objects?

EVAN: Yes. That would be another time frame at play in the work. It depends on the project. I’m a figurative sculptor, so I belong to a very long historical line. However, right from the beginning, one of my anxieties and questions was, how is it possible to be a contemporary artist and be a figurative sculptor at the same time? Especially if the work is highly realistic? There is this relationship to history that is by definition at play in the work, but the weight of that history is also a liability. And so a big part of my effort has been bound up in the question, how do I embrace this form, which is often seen to be retrograde and bound up in history, and yet face toward the present and speak to the moment?

I think an early link to the present came with the connection to the model through a sustained, direct observation process. More recently, this evolved with the relationship to photography. So I don’t tend to speak directly to art history in much of the recent work, precisely because it is implied.

DAVID: Where exactly does art history begin for you?

EVAN: The Greeks, I suppose … I tend to not make works that speak to the historic past. For me, the question is, how do I face the present, be in the present? I think works like the self-portraits or the Stretch pieces are much more motivated by a relationship to the present.

However, the Jim Revisited piece is a different story. It is a sculpture of a sculpture, and so does implicitly allude to the statuary tradition, even if the statue it is based on is a piece I sculpted in the mid-1980s of a friend of mine named Jim.

DAVID: I want to stay with this idea of being in the present, despite the very long time frame going back to the Greeks, and their idealised sculpture of the human form that continued through the Renaissance. When you use the phrase “being in the present”, are you not also conducting all of these historical, temporal, experiential forces? Are they distilled and collapsed into each work?

EVAN: Yes, I would say so. And I might well be thinking of Rembrandt or Chuck Close. Especially Chuck Close. But I am a sculptor and selfportraiture tends not to be a sculptor’s project. The sculptor’s project is a more complex one, involving multiple viewpoints. If you’re observing yourself, how do you do that sculpturally? That’s one of the ways the scanning has opened things up. It gives me a three-dimensional form to work from.

To your point though, history is an undeniable point of reference, another has always been works. But where do you make links between this work, this old self, and works in the history of art? When you’re conceiving the project, but then also when you’re actually working on these objects?

EVAN: Yes. That would be another time frame at play in the work. It depends on the project. I’m a figurative sculptor, so I belong to a very long historical line. However, right from the beginning, one of my anxieties and questions was, how is it possible to be a contemporary artist and be a figurative sculptor at the same time? Especially if the work is highly realistic? There is this relationship to history that is by definition at play in the work, but the weight of that history is also a liability. And so a big part of my effort has been bound up in the question, how do I embrace this form, which is often seen to be retrograde and bound up in history, and yet face toward the present and speak to the moment? I think an early link to the present came with the connection to the model through a sustained, direct observation process. More recently, this evolved with the relationship to photography. So I don’t tend to speak directly to art history in much of the recent work, precisely because it is implied.

DAVID: Where exactly does art history begin for you?

EVAN: The Greeks, I suppose … I tend to not make works that speak to the historic past. For me, the question is, how do I face the present, be in the present? I think works like the self-portraits or the Stretch pieces are much more motivated by a relationship to the present. However, the Jim Revisited piece is a different story. It is a sculpture of a sculpture, and so does implicitly allude to the statuary tradition, even if the statue it is based on is a piece I sculpted in the mid-1980s of a friend of mine named Jim.

DAVID: I want to stay with this idea of being in the present, despite the very long time frame going back to the Greeks, and their idealised sculpture of the human form that continued through the Renaissance. When you use the phrase “being in the present”, are you not also conducting all of these historical, temporal, experiential forces? Are they distilled and collapsed into each work?

EVAN: Yes, I would say so. And I might well be thinking of Rembrandt or Chuck Close. Especially Chuck Close. But I am a sculptor and selfportraiture tends not to be a sculptor’s project. The sculptor’s project is a more complex one, involving multiple viewpoints. If you’re observing yourself, how do you do that sculpturally? That’s one of the ways the scanning has opened things up. It gives me a three-dimensional form to work from. To your point though, history is an undeniable point of reference, another has always been two-dimensional realm we are able to absorb and normalise them. They become a banal part of our vocabulary, something we take for granted. However, in real lived terms, we are hyper-sensitive to any assault on our physical being. So I think a big part of my project is to respond to those moments.

When I identify a moment like that, I ask myself, would this image be tenable in a threedimensional form? What would happen if I take an image that one might assume belongs exclusively to the image world and bring it into the actual space we occupy? What would happen?

I first started making these references with the L. Faux project, referring to some of the conventions of photography and mistakes associated with print media: colour, black-and-white, blur, multiple exposure and mis-registration. Other works refer to the capacity for image manipulation in computer software programs, such as Photoshop – skew, distort, stretch, etc.

It’s a device that allows me to animate the sculptures. But it is also a powerful idea that reminds us of the boundary between the image and our physical reality.

DAVID: Let’s talk about something quite different, about being in Canada, being in Toronto. Obviously you have made a decision by choice, perhaps because of certain traditions here. One thinks of realism in Canada. There seems to be a very developed sensibility in Canadian art that’s fixated on precision in terms of painting that you may or may not have a kinship with. But what about your broader relationship to this culture, if that’s important to you? Or is this just a good place to work? I’m interested in how you think about Toronto and Canada.

EVAN: I’m not entirely sure. I don’t think I necessarily feel a particular kinship with a Canadian realist tradition. I am Canadian, but I am not Canadian born. And my family moved around a lot. I think that part of my early experience has never left me. I tend to see myself as an outsider or on the periphery. On the other hand, I’ve lived in Toronto a long time. I’ve also left it and come back to it. So this is my community. It comes down to that. Toronto is home and it is a good place to live and work. Obviously, it’s not the most dynamic place in the world. There are other art centres that in theory might be more interesting. Toronto does have a robust and complex urban and artistic culture. This is where my artistic family is, if you wish. And it’s also where I can work, and where I have a history of working efficiently.

On a more personal level, any time I have moved, it’s taken me quite a few years to make the adjustment. I think I recognise that moving isn’t just a simple process of transferring yourself from one place to another. You become a different person, and you have to be willing to allow that to happen. Everything around you changes, you have to be willing to absorb that in order to successfully make the transition. I don’t need to put myself through that at this particular time. I can’t speak for the future though.

About ten years ago there was an accumulation of histories and circumstance that allowed me to really pull myself together around a very viable and dynamic practice. I’m not at a point yet, where I want to …

DAVID: Disrupt that.

EVAN: Yes.

DAVID: Clearly, when one thinks of Toronto, one thinks of the film industry. At an early moment in your development you participated in that industry. I think that was important for you as a way of developing a necessary knowledge. But I’m thinking in technical terms about your fantastic achievements there. When I recall the Oliver Stone film JFK, and Kennedy’s head on the autopsy table, for example – that was remarkable. But I’m also thinking about an idea of cinema that has, in a sense, something to do with … we’ve not spoken of this, but with the embodiment of your work in film. I wonder if it was influential for you to see your “sculpture” made for film suddenly converted into moving imagery? Was that at all formative?

EVAN: I would say there’s no way I could be doing this work, except that I had that thirteen-year period in the film industry.

The film work came at a mid-stage in my practice. I had abandoned those early naturalistic figurative pieces that I had developed over the first ten years of my practice. I was dismantling that project and moving into a prolonged period of much more open-ended enquiry, building a broader conceptual platform. Still dealing with sculpture and the body, but not the realist figure. The film work coincided with this period. While in many ways it was antithetical to my studio practice of that time, it did keep me involved in intensive figurative concerns.

DAVID: Your artwork at that time?

EVAN: Well, the large abstracted wax skin drawings, for instance, and the large monumental project based on the absent monument.

DAVID: Right. I was going to say monument project. But yes, monumental. The big head fragments.

EVAN: Yeah, or the early anamorphic pieces, where I first started to reference photography directly. That all happened at the same time as I was in the film industry. So, ironically, after I had let go of this super craft-based figurative project and was doing much more lateral work that was much less bound up in craft and more disparate and deconstruction oriented, I was also doing this film work that was keeping my technical skills up for one thing and adding all sorts of stuff, and forcing me to move into territory that I was actually very uncomfortable with and would not have gone into of my own volition. It was good, but also a hard experience. While I was in the film industry I kept it very separate from my art practice. It was too threatening. Had I still been doing the figures, I think I probably would not have allowed myself to do the film work.

DAVID: What’s that threatening territory?

EVAN: Illusion, stereotype maybe. I never really thought of myself as a realist. I was always exploring how one observes and makes complex mediated objects. It wasn’t about realism. Realism was the by-product. I wasn’t motivated by a desire to make illusion as one must in the film biz. The work I was doing in the film industry placed me directly inside the machinery of popular culture. As artists we tend to imagine that our function is to operate as critical or alternative voices on the margins of popular culture.

There came a point, however, that coincided with the end of my time in the film industry where I had an epiphany. I realised that, in abandoning those early figures, I had let go of my youthful belief in the idea of the extraordinary object and that after twenty years as an artist I had accumulated all these disparate histories, but I had been keeping them separate from each other. And that if I was ever going to be truly good at what I do, it would take everything I’ve got. I would need to bring all these histories together, including the film history, and re-commit to the making of extraordinary objects.

DAVID: What do you want people to confront? How long should they spend with this work?

EVAN: Well, I’m always gratified when I do see people just being drawn in and compelled to stay with the work. It doesn’t happen enough in front of an art object. We tend to gloss over them. I hope my works have a gravitational pull. I always hope that there’s a certain point where people are lost for words, if you wish. That they have to re-verbalise what it is they’ve just seen. The work should be powerful and unexpected. Beyond that, I don’t want to be too particular in my expectations.

DAVID: Speak about your technical abilities and growth over the last ten years. One has the sensation looking at Jim Revisited that it would be one singular, giant cast, which, of course, is not the case. Discuss the evolution of your technical prowess. Are you able today to do everything that you can imagine?

EVAN: I do believe in, and am committed to the idea of, a craft-based process. At the same time, I don’t think it’s necessarily much different than anyone else’s process. It’s evolutionary. We all continue to develop and refine and add to what it is we know. My process happens to follow a certain very highly craft-driven trajectory. There’s always something more to reach for. I don’t know what that is yet, but that becomes the platform for what comes next. You can only imagine so far ahead. It’s largely bound up in what you have done, but each time you can incrementally improve on that or shift from that.

DAVID: Unless you have an epiphany.

EVAN: Yes, there are those few and far between moments that are dramatic and transformative.

DAVID: I wanted to speak about art and your understanding of what art is. It’s interesting that in your home, in your domestic environment, there is actually almost no conventional contemporary art. One or two works by a few of your friends, but otherwise you are surrounded by folk art and craft, heavily laboured and invested-in objects.

EVAN: I’m not a collector of contemporary art, per se. I think in some ways it’s because I do it all day. I am particularly drawn to outsider art and craft practices. There’s also a diversionary activity involved in seeking out these objects, visiting flea markets, rummage sales, etc.

One of my favourite institutions in New York is the American Folk Art Museum. I always make a point of going there when I’m in New York. I am always affirmed by what I encounter there. I’m more likely to have a real art hit there than anywhere else. Even if I just find one or two pieces, that’s all I need in any given day.

DAVID: So what would be an example of that piece that gives you the art charge in the American Folk Art Museum?

EVAN: It can vary. It could be the likes of Henry Darger or Martín Ramírez, who would have self-identified as artists, but it can also be craft objects such as an antique quilt or the amazing tramp art / crown of thorns Empire State Building in the lobby or the enigmatic wire constructions by the Philadelphia Wireman.

DAVID: You have an inclusive idea of art.

EVAN: Well, I think probably what I get from these individuals is that they are motivated from the right place. They just absolutely have to do this necessary activity as irrational or unexpected or unlikely as it is. They have to do it against all odds sometimes in abject and deprived circumstances.

DAVID: Does that relate to how you work?

EVAN: That relationship to the “necessary”, yes. I think, as contemporary artists, we are generally more externally informed, however. We go to art school, we live in the community, we direct our work towards discourse and market but …

DAVID: Talk to museum curators.

EVAN: Sure, all of that, but there’s still at the heart of it this necessary activity. I think one has to constantly remind oneself of that. This is not an optional activity. Outsider practices are just so clear about that.

DAVID: How do you decide who a subject might be for a sculpture?

EVAN: I’ve always been quite ambivalent about that. In the early years I tried to distance myself from decisions that lead to idealising or romanticising the subject. I was more interested in the rigours and specificities of the observational process, so I was less interested in the question of who might or might not be a worthy subject.

DAVID: Someone would volunteer?

EVAN: Yeah, or it could be the convenience of someone in my proximity – did I like them, did we have rapport? And as the works became more involved I also had to take into account whether this person would be available for that length of time or whether they could hold up for that long.

The work of the past ten years or so is quite different. I allow myself to play much more with the question of subject.

DAVID: What about the No One – In Particular sculptures? They present a very different prospect of willing and interested subjects finding you – also very different from the idea of selfportraiture. Perhaps on the surface there’s no difference between a No One – In Particular Evan Penny sculpture and, let’s say, Young Self. Or is there?

EVAN: I think there is, but yes, OK, I hear you. Young Self probably does draw on some of the features of the No One – In Particular project.

DAVID: Such as?

EVAN: That sense of the anonymous or fictitious or some kind of distant, vague personality. And they are both bound up in images. The No One – In Particular characters are a by-product of the fact that we are immersed in images all the time. In a way, so is the Young Self character. I’m producing a plausible, but amalgamated version of myself through these disparate images.

DAVID: Those snapshots?

EVAN: Yeah.

DAVID: But isn’t the No One – In Particular just a complete fabrication, a fabulation, just an idea of a possible individual?

EVAN: Yes. I was relying on as few specific sources as possible. There were fragments of photographs and there was stuff lying around, but I didn’t look at a lot of photographs. It was more the idea of this kind of mélange of images. So no, it wasn’t about me trying to just construct a plausible image of a living person. It was always about looking at television, leafing through magazines, the constant encounter with images of individuals with whom we have no relationship but who we project ourselves onto. The tension between individuality and type.

DAVID: Stereotype?

EVAN: Yeah. So then we progressively construct these notions of identity and appearance based on these broader types. I was hoping the sculptures could emulate those experiences. The first series of No One – In Particular pieces almost all share the same geometry and gesture. The triangulation between eyes and mouth and the pose are identical. It is only the topical treatments that differ. So they aspire to individuality, but are profoundly undifferentiated. The second series differs in that the pieces are more gesturally nuanced. With these, I started from type – young, old, fat – and worked them until the impression of a plausible individual overrode type.

DAVID: Given the range of source material and inspiration you utilise, I wonder if you could reflect on the time it takes you to conceive and execute specific works. How do you relate the hours that go into the making of your work, and then the time that the viewer takes to look at your work?

EVAN: Sometimes it does take a long time to build an object that’s impactful. There is a kind of cumulative effect. I do play off of that idea; that through what is often a mundane, repetitive process there is an accumulative effect. There is an accumulation of moments, thoughts, history, complexity, density, detail, if you wish. Every mark is really, on some level, an idea. And while making it, it may feel mundane, but I think there is a kind of a power to this sort of process that progressively embeds a kind of a content into the work. So I think that equation between spending a long time producing and a short time viewing isn’t a bad one, necessarily.

DAVID: Yes, if, as you say, impact is the result.

EVAN: Yes.

DAVID: And maybe impact can be registered as a kind of resonance through time and the viewer’s experience and recollection.

EVAN: Yes. For instance, a particular example of my thoughts on this goes back many years, to the question of the immediacy of body casting versus the labour intensiveness of the modelling process. The difference between the indexical process and the hand rendered.

DAVID: Modelling.

EVAN: Yes. I always felt that it should be possible to make something much more plausible or realistic from a modelling process rather than from a direct indexing process, even though the indexing process might be “objectively” more accurate or get you to the impression of the real more quickly. But with the indexing process I could not help but feel that one always ended up with something less than what one started out with. It is a replication from life but not an equivalent to life.

DAVID: By definition.

EVAN: By definition. Whereas with the rendering process, the sheer number of decisions you make building the object is a kind of stand in for life itself. The accumulated effect of innumerable conscious decisions imbues the object with consciousness, with thought, with clarity and particularity. That’s where the content is.

DAVID: When did you come to that conclusion?

EVAN: Well, very early on. That would have been a conversation I’d be having with myself in the late seventies, early eighties, as I was trying to figure out why I was drawn to rendering these things as opposed to body casting. Given the times, body casting was the new paradigm.

DAVID: Duane Hanson.

EVAN: John De Andrea, George Segal.

DAVID: And there is the case of Rodin when he first showed The Age of Bronze, a full-body sculpture of a youth, the response was, the critical charge against it, was that he was accused of casting from life, which was the ultimate …

EVAN: Cheat.

DAVID: Exactly. The dismissal, of course. It wasn’t the case, but it spoke to his incredible facility that people thought it was actually cast from life.

EVAN: It was the naturalism of the work.

DAVID: Right.

EVAN: The connection to the subject, the model, was just that it was so naturalistic. To our eye now, it isn’t particularly realistic, it was just that he’d stripped away some of the narrative conceits, or norms of the day. Now, it’s hard to imagine that he would have been accused of body casting, it’s so obviously not body cast, but I think it has to do with how realism progresses, if you wish. And in its day, that was about as close to “the real” as was possible to imagine. No one had seen that before. The distance between what that sculpture was and how they viewed themselves was very small – kind of striking to think of it that way. So one might be tempted to say that there is a linear progression to realism. The progress is measurable. That measure is us, and how we imagine our appearance, based on previous precedents. I see that playing out in my work, for instance. Every new piece pushes the envelope a little and reduces the previous work to something less real.

DAVID: That’s right. Even from six or eight years ago.

EVAN: Or even last year. That’s the problem with improving – you make yourself look bad [laughs].

DAVID: In your best imaginings, what is the effect that you would like your work to have upon the viewer?

EVAN: I think it is important to me that the sculptures, on some level, read the same way we read each other, the way we interact with each other. We don’t interact with each other as objects. We are animate, energies.

I’m always very conscious of trying to locate the experience of the work in my own body and in the way I experience myself, or how I might experience the other, in daily sorts of contexts. I think that for me is a very important principle in virtually all the work. That’s why I often speak to the notion of the “conversational space”.

DAVID: As in conversations, sometime one reaches insight or, perhaps through dialogue, even an epiphany?

EVAN: I have had remarkable moments with works of art. I am thinking of an ancient piece now. There was a remarkable moment for me recently in Rome. A Greek bronze, the Terme Boxer, the seated boxer, in the National Museum of Rome. Just, you know, one of the most amazing objects on the face of the planet! I was transfixed. I could not get close enough and I could not pull myself away. The thought that something like that could speak so powerfully over time and even in its degraded state – because the state it is now is nothing like how it was conceived to be – was really quite stunning. I think also Michelangelo’s last work, the Rondanini Pietà is transcendental. I recently had a similar experience in New York, standing in front of a Pat Steir canvas.

DAVID: And have you had that when you’ve looked at one of your own works? That you thought, hmm, that same feeling?

EVAN: Yeah, I think so. You know, maybe because I want to [laughs].