David Packer is a New York based artist who works in a variety of media: sculpture, drawing, and artist books. The subject matter is that of the everyday: vehicles, plastic water bottles, car engines, dogs, bears, and other animals that come from different areas of interest: technology, industry, and the natural world. “He cleverly manipulates prevailing contemporary ideology to grand effect, making aesthetically pleasing art with socially critical impact.”
Content and media
Packer’s process includes distinct and different, but all inter-related, media, beginning with an enormous collection of photographic images, both analog and digital. As he notes, “My process now is much more image based, in terms of what I will see in an object, if I find an object with resonance, with a depth of meaning.” The resonance, that informs the content of all the work, regardless of media, may include “industry, corporations, how the land is being used, how corporations are taking stuff from the land.”
Large scale, serial works on paper, including mixed media collages, drawings, and highly detailed plans are “patiently and methodically constructed with mechanical precision” and “beautifully conceived and meticulously drawn.” These drawings are crucial to the design and construction of the ensuing sculptures as well as functioning at the same time as independent works of art. The artist books that Packer has made, some unique, some collaged, and some limited edition, parallel the work on paper.
As a sculptor, Packer works primarily in ceramics, and has been described “as a master practitioner of architectural and technical ceramics”; however, he also has used found lumber and discarded industrial metal, highlighting his “investigation of the visual qualities of old and new technologies,” often with “redundant technology imaging redundant industry.” The themes that are important to the artist—industry, technology, nature and humankind’s relationship to these issues—find full form in the sculptures that include rusty metal trucks, dancing bears, Vietnam-era helicopters, and malarial mosquitoes.
Even though “illuminating ecological conditions is no mean accomplishment,” Packer’s work has a strong element of warning, like other “future-conscious artists and creative thinkers”—an awareness of the existence of the “post-industrial moment, a post-industrial vacuum, where not even the cleaners are working.” The ceramic sculpture Bears that Dance is a direct example of warning, with two white polar bears linked together in some ill-defined and strange symbiotic human like relationship. Ultimately Packer “allows his work to become that which it calls into question: namely the rational over the natural.”
Exhibitions and residencies
Since 1983, Packer has exhibited both nationally and internationally, with over 15 one-person shows and over 50 group shows. Two notable exhibitions in New York City are a one person show at Garth Clark Gallery in 2002, where he also had three other group shows, and participation in the group show, Exit Biennial II, Traffic, at Exit Art, 2005, curated by Papo Colo and Jeanette Ingberman.
In 2006, a three-month residency at the Kohler Arts/Industry program allowed the artist to realize a significant and ambitious project: full-size cast ceramic sculptures of V8 car engines. This work, called The Last of the V8s, was both more complex and more ambitious than anything he had tried before. In Packer’s own words: “I never thought how appropriate it would be to manufacture a quintessentially American industrial object in a factory setting.” These sculptures were also included in the show The Moment at Hand at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, as well as subsequently in galleries in New York, Chicago, and Seattle. The predominant use of industrial imagery in such projects and “the never-ending, osmotic flow that underwrites cultural exchange” creates in Packer’s work “a 21st Century elegy for American industrial might” where “the dominant note becomes poignancy.”
Described as an artist “not unaccustomed to functioning outside of his element,” Packer has also shown overseas, often as part of an extended stay at an international residency. This includes three one person shows in Morocco, two in 2012, in Rabat at LeCube Independent Art Room and in Fez as part of the Fez Sacred Music Festival, and in 2019 at Jardin Anima, Marrakech. He has also shown in Tokyo, during a residency at Youkobu Artist in Residence, as well as in Vallauris, France, with a show called Pèlerinage. Other residencies include MacDowell, Yaddo, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.