July 11 - September 25, 2020
A solo exhibition featuring work by Kathleen Packlick.
From the Gallery:
“Kathleen Packlick’s “Misplaced Memory” – some 100 egg tempera and shellac panels and works on paper, as well as collages – are gathered obsessively into compact cosmogonies that provide relief from the intensity of life. A kind of meditative gift is gleaned from the activity. With an exquisite standard of craft, Packlick addresses the senses and, through the senses, communicates to the intellect and the psyche. Wandering through her installation is, by turns, like tumbling into one of Matisse’s paintings – all color and form in endless, fluid flux – and winding through a Beat poem, where the author realizes that everything contains the potential for beauty.
All of Packlick’s works investigate the very notion of the eye across, in and through the surfaces. They MOVE. Some are composed of rows of concentric circles in flux, simultaneously reading as colorful marbles, doughnuts, eyes or planetary charts. Others evoke stones, leaves, raindrops, meteor showers or the random shapes of passing clouds.
At the same time, Packlick’s quirky color choices, her use of yellow and chartreuse, mossy greens and hot pinks, set up an array of shifts and pops, so that the illusory space becomes a lush, vibratory zone of interpenetrating events and planes. She structures the works around an internal grid. Against it, solid and void, foreground and background, abstract pattern and representational image variously reveal and obscure each other. They defy any linear, one-track reading of their subject matter. Rather, they are about the perplexing dilemma of reconciling art and life.
Sometimes the works edge toward a narrative order, revealing rhythms of connection, separation and ending. The entirety may be read left to right, like language, or serve as a painting journal of sorts. Delicately applied and invisibly blended, colors seem at times about to vaporize and at other times like gossamer veils or wrinkled skin. Packlick’s works unfold in time. A shape seems recognizable only for an instant before transforming into another related form. A square becomes a circle, the circle becomes an arc, the arc leads the eye dreamily back into the depths only to discover a mark or gesture that pulls us back to the surface.
Throughout “Misplaced Memory,” Packlick culls motifs from thrift stores or diverse scraps of Pop culture – ubiquitous patterns of the 1940s and 50s – aprons, tablecloths, kitchen linoleum, wallpaper – that pervade childhood memories as both sublime and degraded cultural signifiers. The electrified arrangements wobble and crackle, giving her abstractions the giddy energy of a circus. “When I make the marks, nervous energy comes out,” she says. “Afterwards, I’ll assess what it recalls – a place, or something touched.” In each case, Packlick bends, twists and tweaks the banal into fine-tuned compositions that allude to prior uses, while simultaneously opening the floodgates for more novel revelations.
Taken together, the installations stimulate an excessive production of multiple references and structural chains. Moving back and forth between abstract thought and sensuous physicality, Hutt and Packlick confound the translation of their works between perception and cognition, seeing and knowing. “My Mother’s Legacy” and “Misplaced Memory” offer seemingly infinite points of connection in a disconnected world.”
Kirk Hopper Fine Art (Commerce St.)
3008 Commerce
Dallas, 75226 Texas
214-760-9230
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