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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.
“We are all bound up together in one
great bundle of humanity.”
“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.”
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 send comments or questions about the gallery to
the curator at: the copyright of individual works of art belongs to the
relevant artist
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