The Digital and The Spectral: The Flaying and Incarnation of Self
- Eejin Choi
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Edited by Drew Tang
The Hart House Art Committee’s trip to the Calgary and Banff art scenes started off with an emotionally striking visual experience, as we made our first stop at the TrépanierBaer Gallery, located on 999-8th Street SW, Calgary. Featuring concurrent solo exhibitions by two of Canada’s most established contemporary artists, Evan Penny and Ed Pien, the gallery space offered a rigorous investigation into the ‘undoing’ of the human subject. Through the lenses of myths, digital surveillance, and spectral materiality, the two artists engage in a dialogue about the precariousness of the self in the 21st century.
Evan Penny: The Digital Flaying of the Ovidian Body, and the Venetian Mirror
Of the two exhibitions, Penny’s work, specifically his 2022 sculpture Marsyas, left the staggering impression. A ⅘ life-size sculpture in silicone, resin, and hair, Marsyas draws from the Greek myth of the satyr flayed alive for he lost a musical battle to the god Apollo. The work is grounded in the moment of Marsyas’s cry, of which Ovid writes in Metamorphoses: “Why do you peel me from myself?” Marsyas is suspended in air, hands tied, with silicone horns and hooves hauntingly realistic, evoking an impulse from the viewer to touch the physicality of the sculpture’s vivid materiality. One arm ends without skin, while the gaze is cast down, expressionless, as if the soul itself has been flayed.
Penny isn’t simply reiterating an archaic tragedy; he drags Marsyas’s body into the contemporary world to make a diagnosis, using literal flaying as a metaphor for how contemporary surveillance and image-based technology strip individuals of their privacy and physical wholeness. He suggests that we are currently undergoing a “flaying of realism” as our identities are peeled away from our physical bodies and relocated into the digital realm.
This exploration of the self is further complicated by The Venetian Mirror series. In this series, Penny creates enlarged sculptures of an internal hand grip—the negative space formed when a hand clenches. He then reverses the perspective, polishing the internal side of this grip to a mirror finish. This gesture immediately recalls yet another Ovidian story, the myth of Narcissus. However, it isn’t the traditional Narcissistic gaze taking place. Rather than submerging in love through an external surface, we are forced to see our reflection through the internal lens. It raises the essential question of our time: does our identity reside within our physical interiority, or is it permanently relocated to the skin and the screens that flay our image?
What appears on these mirrors is not only the reflection of hanging Marsyas, but also that of the viewers, clenched within the grip of the myth’s tragic reality. Marsyas was the loser of a battle against a divine power. In Penny's contemporary retelling, the Apollo may well be the relentless development of camera technology and AI. We are left to wonder, then, if we too, are the losers of a battle against a technological divinity that insists on peeling our data–our literal skins, the fingerprints—and images away from our physical selves.
For the Hart House Student Art Committee, this exhibition holds a unique institutional tie, as our collection includes Penny’s concrete work, Mask #1 (1989), a sculpture located outside the Justina M. Barnicke gallery. Being able to witness, rethink and trace the transition of the artist’s human subject from the dense, static concrete ‘mask’ to the glitched, warped silicone materials of Marsyas was particularly interesting.
Ed Pien: Medusa and the Spectral Presence
If Penny’s work is about the undoing of the surface, Ed Pien’s exhibition, Incarnate, is about the haunting persistence of matter. Pien’s practice has traditionally explored the spectral–the way ghosts, memories, and displaced histories linger in our periphery. His early Amsterdam Suite (1999-2002), which borrows from the “anti-squats” of Amsterdam, presented “messy bodies” and cannibalistic figures influenced by Taiwanese and Christian depictions of Hell.
In Incarnate, these folkloric, “Othered” figures have migrated from the two-dimensional page into three-dimensional space. Using a combination of ceramic, handmade paper pulp, weathered wood, and wire, Pien gives these sinister creatures a tactile, resonating presence. Some ceramic elements are partially covered in pulp and drawn on with ink, a direct recall to the mark-making of his earlier Cannibals series.
A significant point of intersection between the two artists is Pien’s Medusa (2025). Composed of human hair and a rock impaled into another rock, the piece serves as a striking counterpoint to Penny’s Marsyas. Whereas Marsyas represents the flaying of the skin, and its fluidity through hyper-materialism, Medusa represents the petrification of the gaze. Upon asking the gallery staff, we learned that the central element of Medusa was not a fabrication; the artist found the stones in nature, the core stone already naturally embedded within the larger rock at the time of discovery. This detail mesmerized us. By working with a found geological violence and combining it with real human hair, Pien suggests that the myths we tell are already embedded in the earth. The impalement is a moment where the fluid, spectral world of Pien’s earlier ink drawings is incarnated by the force of nature.
The Act of Undoing and the Incarnation
Walking through the curation at TrépanierBaer Gallery creates a unique tension between the two artists' treatment of human subjects: the corporeal yet fluid works, and the elemental, yet paralyzed works of Pien. Penny’s subjects often stare back at us with a terrifyingly clear, resin-glass gaze that demands immediate physical response. Pien’s sculptures and sketches, by contrast, are “ambiguous and lively,” grounded in what he calls the “creative intelligence of matter.” What is astonishing about such comparison is that both artists touch upon the undoing of the self as a prerequisite for renewal. Penny’s statement notes that “peeling away from oneself” involves a willingness to lose oneself in order to find new experience. Pien’s Incarnate appears oddly similar, suggesting that by allowing matter to speak for its own presence–through its own processes – we can find our spiritual self even in ‘unsettled’ spaces.
All things considered, the October visit to TrépanierBaer was undoubtedly a highlight to start off the Committee’s trip, as it reminded us that the gallery is not merely a space for the observation of beauty, but a site for the confrontation of our own instability. Through Penny’s tactile sculptures and Pien’s found objects, we were able to reconcile our physical presence with our digital and spectral presence.
Eejin Choi is a second-year undergraduate Art History and Literature & Critical Theory student, who enjoys working with gouache and oil paints. As the Co-Chair of the Student Projects Subcommittee, Eejin works with students to organize curatorial and community-based art events such as Talking Walls exhibitions and Art Markets.
Sources
TrépanierBaer Gallery. “Inaugural Exhibitions.” September 13, 2025. https://trepanierbaer.com/inaugural-exhibitions/.
Taylor, Kate. “Evan Penny Peels Back Our Selves with Unsettling Exploration of Greek Myth and the Alienation of AI.” The Globe and Mail, October 12, 2024. https://trepanierbaer.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Evan-Penny-Globe-and-Mail-Review-2024.pdf.
Penny, Evan. “Marsyas and the Venetian Mirror.” 2024. http://www.evanpenny.com/commentary_marsyas_and_the_venetian_mirror.php.
Pien, Ed. “Amsterdam Suite.” Ed Pien. Accessed January 6, 2026. https://www.edpien.com/amsterdamsuite
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