Uneasy: The Hyper-Real Sculptures of Sam Jinks
Photos courtesy of the artist and Sullivan+Strumpf
Sam Jinks’ work hits like a shot to the body. There’s a sudden impact, and it bruises the most important organs. The uneasy feeling settles in and deepens over time.
Partly, that’s because hyperreal sculpture itself is unsettling. The familiarity of the form violates our ability to hold the content at arms length, to politely speculate. There is nothing between the viewer and the vignette. There’re no brush strokes or generalizations for the mind to hide behind. We instinctively reflect because we’re so familiar with the details, and sympathy can be a heavy stone.
But Jinks wields our sympathy effectively. Trained as a special effects artist for movies, he renders the biggest ideas of humanity in somewhat forgiving theatrical motifs. For instance, the pieces are typically smaller than life-size. This malformation of scale gives the viewer the ability to existentially step back from the work a little, not unlike the giantism employed by mentor and fellow Australian Ron Mueck.
But there’s still those details—the follicles and capillaries—that collapse the viewer’s distance from the work far deeper than size can offset.
For example, “Untitled (The Pieta),” is a visceral, alienating take on Michelangelo’s sculpture of Mary cradling a lifeless but lovely Jesus. In Jinks’ Pieta, a middle-aged man holds a dead, deflating, grotesque old man. The vitality of the tanned young man looking down on the naked and deteriorating body resonates at high levels of the psyche. It’s a short bridge—a brief life—between the two men. We’re all dead.
But no bother. For Jinks, death is just a fact of science. Melancholy is something viewers may bring with them, but it isn’t necessarily the intent. Jinks is clear on the fact that people will bring to the work what they will, regardless of his experience making it, and that’s okay.
“Unsettled Dogs,” and Jinks’ more conceptual works, could be taken as an exception to his use of familiarity, but it’s not. By giving the sleeping figures the heads of dogs, he reveals more about the nature of a young man and woman than if he realistically rendered human heads. The naked man-beasts reveal elements of survival that lie beneath our waking veneers of decency, family love, and trust. Let the beasts lie, even if they are small. They are beautiful but protective. Disturb the pack, they’ll fight and feed.
“Unsettled Dogs” is part of a installation called Time Machine that includes two other sculptures: two newborns sleeping with their faces toward one another, a repetition of the posture in “Unsettled Dogs,” and an enlarged, monstrously accurate fetus. The three pieces make a kind of life-cycle culminating in the two miniature man-beasts. Jinks’ take on the progression of life carries both a biological and psychological momentum. We’re conceived hideous in the womb, are born lovely and cling to each other throughout life, for survival and rest.
It can be a roller-coaster sculpting some of the figures, both emotionally and technically… Sometimes it means I’m surrounded by uncomfortable images.”
While Jinks’ bent toward science and psychology make his art firmly contemporary, he’s working in a high art tradition of figurative sculpture that can’t be contained. He offers new light on themes that have resonated before the original pieta. There’s the crucifixion-like piece “The Hanging Man,” the resting contrapposto of “Unsettled Dogs” and the similar “Doghead”—the subtle quality of emotion in every face and a fascination with anatomy everywhere.
“I like the momentum the Renaissance works have. They have a currency that we’re hardwired to respond to,” Jinks said. “The work of that period was often based in religion and was quite powerful. The work I do borrows a lot from Renaissance, but bases it in science and the contemporary world.”
In doing so, Jinks manages to combine a passionate attention to detail, an appreciation for the effective forms and themes of art history and the stormy psychology of our post-existential age.
“The Hanging Man” may best hit the high points of this combination. Crucified without the commanding presence of outstretched arms and a quick death, life slips from the Hanging Man slowly, meekly. Again there’s the buzz-cut everyman motif. We know this guy. Sympathy kicks in. Sadly, he’s resigned to his fate. He still has strength. His fingers press into the rear wall, not willing to push all the way off, not willing to give up his weird martyrdom.
In this way, “The Hanging Man” is the modern martyr. The compulsion to believe we are living and dying for something is stripped away. What’s left is another everyman deteriorating, pinned to a wall by his own stupid will. While any take on Jinks’ work is obviously subjective, it’s impossible to look at the work and not interpret. The familiarity is too much. And he admitted that the process is “an emotional journey”: “It can be a roller-coaster sculpting some of the figures, both emotionally and technically,” he said, explaining his process. “I use a lot of reference material: photos, life models, life casts of various poses and body parts. Sometimes it means I’m surrounded by uncomfortable images.”
Alone in his studio with a disturbing piece like “The Hanging Man,” or the alien vulnerability of a massive fetus, or the untitled mouthless aberration of a man’s face, Jinks gets to the crux of the tenderness and violence of the human animal.
But he holds his intentions close to his chest. Rather than intentional, Jinks says the work is instinctual, that the connection between he and the viewer is something wordless. It’s open to the distances of experience and time.
“After the work is made, I can’t control how people feel, as individual perceptions on life and art can vary so much. I accept this.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 27, which is sold out. Get our latest issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
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