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Sharlene
Packer:
Moving Towards Center
March 28 – May 23
Artist’s Statement
Riding camel back through India’s Thar Desert, in 1994, I
was enraptured by the pink sandstone slabs that sided houses and fenced yards.
The slender stones danced in my mind and formed sculptures. Soon pink Stonehenge
monoliths circumscribed a red-earth island floating in a mossy moat. Each stone
represented a religion. My mind related the circle to a wheel—my analogy for
religion/spirituality. Each religion is a spoke, at the outer rim the spokes
appear far apart: the rituals seem divergent; but at the center all the spokes
unite: the doctrines speak of similar truths and ethics. Later in the Yucatan
another layer was added to my red island. Intrigued by the Mayan steles and how
they recorded the sovereign’s history in hieroglyphics, I envisioned each
religion carved in symbols on the sandstone.
In
1995, I arrived in Homer, Alaska to set up a life and a studio. Without a
sandstone quarry nearby I embarked on a two-dimensional version. As the
installation evolved, I would paint unique religious rituals from around the
world. On the back of each scroll, I painted a compassion quote from their
sacred texts. To expand the analogy of the wheel further I created an axle as a
cylinder that had tall the religions’ compassion quotes, in English, spiraling
upward. I wanted to represent the whole world so that in addition to presenting
the major religions I included select primal religions to fill in the regional
gaps. I also balanced images of women and men, individuals and groups, young and
old. I consciously didn’t want an even number of paintings. I ended up with 23
scrolls, a prime number unable to be divided, standing as one, a symbol of the
world being one entity. A concept I have seen people struggling with since my
early years.
Moving
from Montreal to Miami when I was ten broke my childhood innocence. I was bussed
into a poor predominantly black neighborhood and had stones thrown at me. I sat
in a classroom where whites sat on one side of the room and blacks on the
other. The Jamaican I dated wouldn’t go to the prom with me for the fear of
what his peers would think. I witnessed a teenager passenger point a gun at the
driver next to them, and so forth. However, it wasn’t until my visit to the Anne
Frank house in Amsterdam, after high school graduation, that the magnitude of
atrocities humans do to others stunned me. Anne Frank’s secret hideout didn’t
surprise me, since growing up Jewish I was familiar with her story, but rather
the reception area’s exhibit did horrify me. The walls were covered with
newspaper and magazine articles about recent genocides. Wasn’t the holocaust
something that we all agreed was atrocious? Why was it repeated again and again?
Hadn’t we learned to treat others like fellow human beings? Years later, I still
can’t comprehend. If only we could remember.
“We are all bound up together in one
great bundle of humanity.”
-Frances E.W. Harper, a free woman of color (1825-1911)
When
I noticed the installation was not only the distilment of my religious studies
and travels but also focused on transforming intolerance towards others into
compassion, the project became more complete and reflected my personal mandate.
The outer circle of magazine and newspaper articles of religious conflict
developed. Never did I imagine I would spend three years on this project, but
processes take you on strange, frustrating, and beautiful paths.
“To see the earth as it truly is, small and
blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves
on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold –
brothers who know they are truly brothers.”
- Astronaut Archibald MacLeish
Curator’s
Statement
Each of the 23 paintings
that, along with a transparent cylinder bearing compassion texts from 23
religious traditions, make up Moving Towards Center is in the format of a
hanging scroll. In Japan or China, such a scroll would hang in a special niche
in a home or public place, creating an island of peaceful contemplation in the
midst of everyday life. For Sharlene Packer, the circle formed by these scrolls
is such an island, a serene, holy wheel that stands in tension with the
newspaper articles on the walls describing the many ways that human beings
inflict pain on those who they perceive as somehow other. She writes that
installing the scrolls in the middle of the room
allows
viewers to move fluidly through the exhibit. This is the advantage, the beauty,
of an installation versus just paintings on the wall—the experience of moving
through the exhibit alters, enhances, and transforms a viewer’s experience. It
gives a deeper understanding of its intent, as the placement is symbolic like
wandering through Stonehenge or walking around a Tibetan prayer wheel.
Although this exhibition was
planned long before the current hostilities in the Middle East, its message of
compassion and mutual understanding is particularly timely. Packer believes that
each religious tradition, each culture, provides a path—however
incomplete—towards spiritual growth. By showing decisive moments from a great
many traditions, she allows us to perceive our common humanity, our common
yearnings, our common intuition that there is more to life than simple survival.
Each scroll uses papers or
cloths with printed or embroidered or woven motifs and colors that evoke the
visual and tactile aesthetic associated with a particular tradition. Looking at
these rich borders of damask or bark cloth or velvet or rice paper, and the
paintings they frame, one can almost smell the incense and hear the chants of
Orthodox Christians, Buddhist priests, or the Muslim faithful at prayer. These
images remind us how little most of us know about other religious faiths, and
how little people who practice them probably know about ours. They invite us to
consider that God is bigger than any one tradition’s ability to know or even to
imagine.
Born in Montreal, Sharlene
Packer studied Chinese brush painting in
Taiwan,
batik in Bali, and received a BA in “Meaning, Culture, and Change” at World
College West, Petaluma, California. She has shown her paintings and mixed media
works locally and nationally, and is represented in numerous private
collections. She currently lives and works in Homer, Alaska, where she continues
to explore the meaning of compassion through her paintings and mixed-media
installations.
Deborah
Sokolove
Curator, Dadian
Gallery
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