Jenna Packer in Art New Zealand
Art New Zealand, #193, Autumn 2025
Edward Hanfling reviews Jenna Packer’s exhibition Toro at Ashburton Art Gallery in October, 2024
Packer imagines a post-capitalist future that is eminently credible, where people subsist in campsites put together with leftovers from the age of consumerism – old cars and plastic tarpaulins for shelter, white plastic chairs, metal drums for lighting fires in’. In a series of [six] small paintings (about the size of the cigar-box lids some plein-air painters once used) we see isolated ad hoc lake- or harbour-side settlements. And in the true ‘masterpiece’ of the show, the large pencil-on-canvas Big Tree (2024), Packer envisages a more extensive community sprawling across a desolate environment, the big open spaces of the off-white canvas leaving room for the viewers imagination too. These works are not lyrical and fanciful, but to the point; there is no beating about the bush, and no bull.
