A Painter Challenges the Traditional Privilege of the White Male Gaze

Jennifer Packer’s Breathing Room creates space between the subject and the viewer.

by Antwaun Sargent

January 11, 2016, 11:38pm

April, 2015, Oil on canvas, 24 x 14 inches,61 x 35.6 cm / All images courtesy of the Jennifer Packer

The emotional paintings of Jennifer Packer mean to challenge the male gaze and reject the politics of perception that traditionally define classical representation in figurative painiting. In the show Breathing Room at Sikkema Jenkins & Co gallery, Packer's works activate quiet moments to create space between the figure and the gaze and the artist and the works.

Packer’s paintings marvel at the mundane—expressing freedom in the form of solitude. The show includes paintings of flowers and objects that value the ordinary. Yet, the new paintings are also about race and “thinking about black identity in the everyday,” says Packer. “I’m interested in presenting and protecting the black body in ways that hasn’t quite been represented yet," she says. “Some of the paintings are from life and some are from memory. I wanted to present black subjectivity with a kind of withholding. It doesn’t have to be about power over the gaze but that a body can choose to be in its own world and separate itself.”

And Dreaming, 2015, Oil on canvas, 20 x 10 inches, 50.8 x 25.4 cm

Traditionally, the gaze in fine art has represented a privileged access to the body, usually from that of a white male. It is a contested gaze that many artists challenge to combat with their own artistic experience and vision, especially in painting women and people of color. The painted "minority" figures tend to stare powerfully and directly out expressing an equality that subjugates the position of the viewer’s power. In Packer’s shambolic renderings the painted eyes are not present. Many of her works, in fact, seem only partially painted. Packer’s figures resist the traditional gaze and the liberated one too. How can one build a relationship with a figure without their eyes? In And Dreaming the scrawling figure holds its arms up over its eyes and in April, the figure's eyes are hard to see, while in William they are nonexistent.

In Packer’s paintings, parts of the body have to be imagined. They are hidden to reveal what the artist Carrie Mae Weems calls, “a cloud of invisibility,” that erases and essentializes blackness. Simultaneously, the figure's rejection of formal composition communicates the essential information. “If the paintings could be paired down it would be difficult to disregard the meaning between the presence of a fingernail as having a kind of value within a picture as opposed to everything being described,” explains Packer.

“With April, I like what seems like a relaxation but also what seems like a withholding in terms of the hands crossing and the dissolution of the body as a mechanism to distance but at the same time her also being very present,” explains Packer to The Creators Project. For Packer, her subjects represents “a self determined act that is not contingent on otherness. I don’t want to privilege a person’s desire to connect with a figure that’s not the way our lives function.”

The figurative paintings represent a reciprocal relationship. Packer actually has close bonds with the figures rendered.“It feels odd to find strangers as though they are objects and present them as my work.” She adds, “the paintings are a promise in a relationship.”