Savannah artist taps into personal anxieties, fears in new show at Laney Contemporary

Walk through the bright green front doors and into the the entryway of Laney Contemporary, housed in a starkly beautiful brutalist building west of downtown Savannah at 1810 Mills B Lane Blvd., and the first thing you’ll see is a skeletal fish that artist Will Penny has mounted to the wall.

Okay, it’s not actually a fish skeleton but, rather, a hacked Big Mouth Billy Bones, the skeletal animatronic cousin of Big Mouth Billy Bass, the singing plastic gag gift from the late '90s/early-2000s that Penny has used in his work before. Meant to mimic the kind of stuffed specimen you might find mounted to a plaque in an angler’s office, both Billys originally included cheeky audio tracks like “Take Me To The River” and “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”

“The Storyteller,” as Penny’s boney bass is titled, instead uses an A.I. voice to tell the tale of a family of three and their encounter with a Sasquatch during a getaway to Hunting Island State Park. It’s affixed to a wall that the author has painted to mimic the fading light of dusk through the trees.

It’s a harbinger of what’s to come in Nothing to Fear, his wild, yet deeply thoughtful, second exhibition at the high-end art gallery.

“One thing that’s been new over the last couple of years, I’ve been trying to tap into and dig into, a lot of my own visual tendencies,” Penny explained of his process. “And not just that, but also the source of my own anxieties and paranoia and fears, and the things that have persisted in my life. A lot of that stuff seems like it could be traceable to events and things that happened in my youth and my adolescence.”

Penny continued, “When I was a kid I was terrified of the corn fields that lined the farm that I grew up on, because I thought there were aliens lurking in there. On TV it was Unsolved Mysteries, and X-Files was brand new. Watching E.T. as a kid was one of the most terrifying things for me. I was just sitting there on the couch…stone-cold frozen terrified, hot and cold at the same time.”

'Undeniably seductive, but edged with anxiety'

Adjacent to the lobby is Laney Contemporary’s downstairs gallery. For Nothing to Fear, the room is cloaked in darkness. Within are several works: A large projection mapped panel of swirling commercial images from the late '90s (“After These Messages, We’ll Be Right Back”), a video of a perpetually flickering candle (“Slow Burn”), six silver nitrate-coated vessels containing flower-like LED fans colorfully spelling out '90s band lyrics, and a VR setup where visitors can relive 24 hours at the spot on Huntington Island where the Sasquatch was spotted (“BFRO Report #74788 {Class A}, Hunting Island, South Carolina - 8-2-2022”).

It feels a little bit like being in a mall arcade back when those were a thing, but the mall arcade in the Netflix show Stranger Things, where weirdness resides at all times just outside the bounds of perception. It’s undeniably seductive, but edged with anxiety.

“I think I resisted letting some of [the supernatural] stuff in because it didn’t seem like it was the right subject matter,” Penny said. “I was still stuck with, ‘I gotta explain why this stuff is finding its way into the work.’ I was still in the post-thesis world. Over time I just realized that it was more important for me to be enthused about the research that I was doing, that could also then yield work that I maybe had more questions about than answers.”

Heading upstairs, visitors are confronted with a pair of angry eyes on a field of dark blue, an image related to the lifestyle brand No Fear, from where the show’s title (and font style) are derived. Turning left, the hallway to the main gallery seemingly offers another gauntlet of unease, as the entire passageway is lined with hockey masks.

But digging deeper into the pieces, each named after the player who originally created the mask’s design in the '60s and '70s, reveals that rather than object of terror, the artist conceives of them as protective devices, what he described as “armor.” And if you look closely enough, you’ll see that Penny has allowed space for humor, like hidden images of cats or of cartoons from the artist’s youth.

Beyond the hallway is the main gallery, and the most visually contemplative component of the exhibition. Here the artist essentially duplicates the faux-forest painted walls that accompany the Big Mouth Billy Bones animatronic on the first floor. But rather than technology, here Penny has collected the latest evolution of his wall relief paintings, abstract works that seek to redefine the genre through form.

But as with everything in Nothing to Fear, these pieces have a twist: Hidden within each piece are stenciled color fields featuring GoreGrinder, a nearly illegible heavy metal album cover font.

“These [relief paintings] have always been about creating a sense of light, and pushing boundaries of space, of how you interact with them and how the form can change and shift,” Penny said. “Which seems [a lot like] being lost in the woods, or going on a hunt through a space that has very particular light qualities that shift and evolve, and you can easily get lost.”

The remaining works occupy the room beyond, Laney Contemporary’s fabled mirror room. Continuing the slow visual draw down from the tense peak of the No Fear eyes, here Penny has added further comfort, showcasing a few more of his relief paintings under the glow of colorful vintage owl lights strung from the ceiling, lights that were common at campsites he visited when he was a kid growing up in Canada.

The seats along the western wall, and the bar opposite, further invite a sense of peace and safety, after a journey fraught with cryptids, intense hard rock music, faceless hockey masks, and dark forests. It’s not only literally the end of the show’s natural viewing path, but an end to the narrative; an epilogue, of sorts.

“I hope that it can kind of be like storytelling, or something akin to modern cinema and movies,” the artist said of his unconventional subject matter. “[Take, for example] a Marvel movie, and it could be something that has a lot of Easter eggs, for the fandom. And for me, that’s special. But also for a broader audience, it’s hopefully still a good story.”

If You Go >>

What: Will Penny’s Nothing to Fear

When: On view through March 23; Penny will be conducting an artist talk in the space on from 6:30-7:30 p.m., March 21

Where: Laney Contemporary, 1810 Mills B Lane Blvd.

Info: laneycontemporary.com

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah artist finds Nothing to Fear in Laney Contemporary exhibition