“Now you see it now you don’t” is not only the magician’s catchphrase it is an accurate assessment of how seeing actually works for us. But here, Packer has elected not to depict her, which suggests that the act of seeing is a process, with its sporadic and fragmentary apprehensions. Amy Sherald’s portrait of Taylor re-presented her to a great deal of public fanfare with the painting featured on the cover of Vanity Fair, and the work itself sold under terms of joint ownership by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC, and by the Speed Museum in Louisville. Think of all the images that have sought to recover Taylor, commemorate her, use her to represent a kind of regal Black womanhood, and utilize her as an emblem of the ongoing struggle of people of color to be recognized as other than a threat, especially by those empowered by the state to enforce the law. It sounds like a cry out to her - seeking her, to find her wherever she has gone. The evocation of Breonna Taylor’s name in the title is key. Jennifer Packer “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!)” (2020) Most everything in this room is tenuous, piecemeal, precarious. And the image of the fan is broken by an intervening milk carton so that the machine seems to float. The one in the middle, just above the reclining figure’s raised thigh is a box fan, its blades frozen in a blur of four blades held mid-stroboscopic effect so that I can’t tell in what direction they are turning. There are actually three fans in the room, a fact which can only become evident after a long time looking at the image. This fan is primarily made recognizable by the bright white bulb at its center with the blades seeming like they have been set in motion and thereafter can only be glimpsed in short bursts of apprehension. A ceiling fan is caught mid-cycle, the whoosh of one of its arms arrested but leaving a chem trail, the other arm ghostly white again against a pink backdrop. In the painting “Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!)” (2020) the corporeal world in certain moments becomes ephemeral, gauzy. In a previous interview the artist has said, “I don’t usually use the word ‘intuitive,’ but I feel like I flow between moments of observation and imagination.” In the work of The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing I can see her feeling her way through the premonitions and inklings that occur to her in the moment of making, and recognize that she’s made deliberate choices in response and I endorse almost every single one. What is so striking about the painting of Jennifer Packer in her Whitney Museum exhibition is the way she handles the relationship between the ethereal and the physical and how she transitions between the two realms. Jennifer Packer, “A Lesson in Longing” (2019) (all images by the author unless otherwise indicated)

Jennifer packer