Will Penny, Between the Screen and the Hand
Across painting, sculpture, projection, code, and relief, Will Penny builds a world in which technology has texture—and the familiar turns slightly strange.
Painting remains the point of departure for Will Penny, even when the finished work moves, glows, responds, or projects beyond the conventional edge of a canvas.
Born in Woodstock, Ontario, in 1984 and now based in Savannah, Georgia, Penny works across painting, video, sculpture, programming, and projection. He received a fine-art diploma from Fanshawe College before completing both a BFA and MFA in painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design. His practice brings traditional forms of art-making into conversation with new technologies, using both to examine presence, fantasy, embodiment, and the sublime.
Digital processes are not an escape from physical making in Penny’s work. They are another means of testing pictorial space. He has worked with CAD design, three-dimensional modeling, animation, projection mapping, and game-design software, often beginning with an image on a computer before deciding how it might take physical form. The resulting works include faceted reliefs, mirrored and holographic surfaces, phosphorescent panels, printed canvases, moving images, and site-specific projections.
Technology may supply the tools, but the source material is frequently personal. Penny’s 2024 exhibition Nothing to Fear drew together early animatronics, The X-Files, ice hockey, household trinkets, and fragments of 1990s advertising. Artificial intelligence, programming, video, projection, acrylic, resin, silver nitrate, and altered found objects shared space within the exhibition. Nostalgia was not preserved intact; it was dismantled, distorted, and recombined until the familiar acquired an uncanny second life.
Other bodies of work approach perception through place. The immersive installation Neutral Zone explored simulation, interactivity, and what Penny describes as techno-romanticism, occupying the unstable territory between illusion and reality. For en plein air, he used photogrammetry and digital programs to reconstruct fragments of Savannah, turning landscapes and memories into hybrid composites rather than literal representations.
That instability continues when the work enters a room. A relief can read as painting from one position and sculpture from another. Mirrored or phosphorescent surfaces alter as daylight changes. Digital forms acquire weight, edges, and shadows; physical materials begin to behave like images on a screen.
Penny does not resolve the divide between technology and tradition. He lets the friction remain visible. The handmade becomes slightly virtual, the digital unexpectedly tactile, and each makes the other more difficult to take for granted.