A Lesson in Longing

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• A Lesson in Longing

  In Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing

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  A Lesson in Longing

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  Narrator: Packer titled this monumental canvas A Lesson in Longing. 

  Jane Panetta: For me, one of the most striking things about it is the places in which she leaves portions of the canvas really incomplete. That she doesn’t give you all the information, that you kind of visually have to fill it in for yourself. And I think for her, she’s talked a lot about, in painting Black individuals and people in her community and her family, a desire not to give over the full information about the sitters. That there’s a desire to protect her intimacy with them and just as a means to protect them, to not fully put them out into the world.

  I’m also really struck by the use of this pinkish-red color throughout the painting and I think for Jennifer, she’s also always interested and almost challenging herself to think about how one can construct a painting. And so has been interested often in making these monochromatic works that are dominated by a single color.

  This painting is also one that I think feels almost drawing-like. Both in the way she’s rendered aspects of it very finely and in a very detailed way. And she’s, of course, an artist that’s also very interested in drawing and that’s a big piece of her practice. But I also think the way that she’s left the painting to drip and the way that the painting has kind of slid down the canvas in many places often completes the composition. And I think it also is a way that she’s really reminding you that this is a painting that she’s made that’s experimenting with how you fill out a composition.

• Jennifer Packer

  In 2019 Biennial

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  Jennifer Packer

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  Jane Panetta: I think one of the most important things about this painting is the very fact of its incompleteness in places.  

  Narrator: Biennial co-curator Jane Panetta discusses Jennifer Packer’s A Lesson in Longing, the large, predominantly red canvas on view here.

  Jane Panetta: While it's a huge canvas, she hasn't covered it everywhere. She's intentionally left portions of it blank.

  You can imagine the full scene of it even though she's only given you incomplete bits of information. And Packer does this often, uses a limited palette in her painting, and I think that's another strength of it. It's a unifying element that it's primarily painted in this pinkish red, with just a little bit of green and white. While that's sort of un-naturalistic, these figures aren't all actually red like this, the plants aren't red, you don't question that, you kind of accept this is the total composition and it becomes this really powerful unifying thing.

  Packer often paints her friends and family and they have really consistently been the subject matter of her work and of her portraits. I think in relation to this incompleteness, Jennifer's often thought about by not painting them fully, by not giving them over fully to the viewer. That becomes this almost protective gesture. Even a way to keep some of the intimacy of her relationship to these sitters.