Victor John Penner photographs, District* (based on a true story), West Vancouver Museum, until May 6. Artist Talk: April 15, 2 p.m.
… and there, behind the curtain, the man who was perhaps New York’s most famous artist looked up and …
No, let’s not jump ahead.
Just after the First World War a Mennonite family in Russia considered immigrating to Canada …
No, that’s too far back, we’ll never fit everything in.
Some teenagers revel in high school’s mix of cliques and classes, gleaning as much knowledge as possible. Victor John Penner was not such a teenager.
“I didn’t have a stellar high school experience. I was sort of the outsider and I was a bit of a troublemaker,” he remarks of his time at Sentinel and West Vancouver secondaries.
His “Mennonite by heritage” family had just moved from East Vancouver to the British Properties. The change of venue unnerved the young artist, who recalls that he “tried to fit in by doing all the wrong things,” much to the chagrin of his father.
The family precepts were threefold, Penner recalls: “Church and school and keep your nose clean.”
However, as the youngest of five children born to two wearying parents, Penner found he was winning the battle of attrition his four siblings had lost.
“By the time I was in high school my parents had just sort of given up,” he says with a laugh.
Dropping out of high school gave him the freedom to do whatever he wanted, he just didn’t know what that was.
He palled around with some kids he’d once shared church pews with, which provided an unlikely path to the inside of a modeling agency.
“There were all these young girls and I went, ‘Wow, this is amazing. What’s this about?’” he remembers.
Newly inspired, he became the only male student at the Blanche MacDonald Fashion Design school.
With a loan from his older brother, Penner joined a class field trip to New York, following his classmates to 254 West 54th Street, just off Broadway.
It was Studio 54, a palace of disco and decadence.
“They just opened the doors and let us in,” Penner recalls.
He walked behind an unguarded curtain (“I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to,”) and stumbled into a private party.
“I went, ‘Andy Warhol!’ and he went, ‘Yeah, hello, how are you?’”
For the next 20 minutes Penner talked with New York’s most famous artist and fashion designer Paloma Picasso.
“It just triggered this thing: I can do this,” he recalls.
That sense of belief propelled Penner through a career that’s included graphic design work in Tokyo, Japan and exhibitions at museums in San Francisco and New York.
He also did the impossible: he went home again.
Almost as soon as he left the North Shore, the place became “part of my distant past,” Penner recalls.
But after an encounter with a high school teacher, he dug into old yearbooks and explored what he’d left behind.
“I realized what a huge influence living there had been … the design, architecture, the art.”
That realization informs his current show, Distrct* (based on a true story).
The exhibition captures black clouds in inky water, an animal’s head, and a darkened parking lot.
The photos have one commonality: empty space where a person might be.
“I want you to be the person. … It’s a real personal moment. It’s just you and your thoughts.”
The show received a rave from MLA Ralph Sultan, who reportedly responded to Penner’s photos by saying: “I don’t know what I’m looking at but if this is the new art, I love it!”
The pictures form an unorthodox self-portrait, Penner says.
“It’s not just pictures of stuff,” he says. “If (viewers) want to share a moment with me all they have to do is go and look at the show.”
