Penny Slinger

PlayPen documents the collaborative photographic works of Los Angeles based artists Penny Slinger and Polly Borland. 

 

The corpus of PlayPen is a selection of photographs featuring Borland’s nude (and nearly nude) body, contorted and distorted, gazing directly at the camera’s lens. Slinger says that while her own practice has aspired to “all kinds of representation of the feminine,” PlayPen marked an opportunity to “throw away all prejudgment and come into a new way of looking, a new feminine gaze.” It’s a gaze that Borland seems to accept willingly—posing and preening with proud defiance, seemingly spurred on by Slinger, her “conjuring magician who simply got me to play my way through the blobs and get glimpses of light and hope.” By ‘blobs,’ Borland refers metaphorically to her own body, and also in a literal sense to the scrunched forms and fruit that hug her figure in several of the images, held securely in place by full body stockings and tights—a recurrent feature and prop used on others in Borland’s solo practice.