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Home » News » FSU Art MFA '94 David Packer in "Toil" at Curatorium, Hudson, NY

FSU Art MFA '94 David Packer in "Toil" at Curatorium, Hudson, NY

Published December 9, 2013

“Toil”
Curatorium
EB Fine Art
Hudson NY
A one person installation by David Packer: five original photographic images and
three ceramic sculptures installed directly opposite the railway station in Hudson, NY.

curatoriumDecember 1st 2013 to February 15th 2014, with a closing reception on February 15th.
Open: 24/7 (Drive by location…)

“You get up every morning to the sound of the bell…”
Bruce Springsteen

“Toil” is about where industry used to be: this location used to be industrial, right across from the docks where the whales were processed, where the lumber was cut and sold, where the money was made.  You ‘used’ to get up every morning to the sound of the bell.  The signs (remains) of this industry are still evident, but the buildings are battered, faded and empty.  Many more adjectives could be used here.  We are in a post-industrial moment, a post-industrial vacuum, where not even the cleaners are working.
Enter into this post-moment, five photographic images and three sculptures, all referring to industry but no longer of it.  The photographs randomly image global industrial locations, all faded like the subject matter, and the dogs belong to the same system of profit that doomed the whales.  (A note for nerds: all the images date back over twenty years and were originally made with film: redundant technology imaging redundant industry.)
Reading the ceramics is also nuanced.  The trucks have their own internal industrial/post-industrial moment.  A series of industrial vehicles was made fifteen years ago, bright, brash and optimistic, and these trucks are the return visit, now less strident and more ephemeral.  They have been undermined and overshadowed by passing events; it is only the image, the idea that remains.  They have become shadows of their former selves.
The owls contain the most direct reference in the show to industry’s nemesis nature.  They were mass-produced industrially, and the slippage between process and image creates anxiety.  They sit on a manufactured perch, waiting for something to change again.

4For more information, visit http://www.packerdavid.com/new/curatorium/index.htm