Like Beacon, Hudson is one of the interesting off-off-off-Cheslea venues in upstate New York to watch for new and experimental work. Case in point: Toil, an exhibition at the Curatorium by David Packer. Toil,which ran until Valentine’s Day, dwelt on the kind of post-industrial gloomscapes common across the eastern section of the country.
Toil, according to the gallery, was about where industry used to be. This location in Hudson 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. The remains of this industry are still evident, but the buildings are battered, faded and empty. 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. All the images date back over 20 years and were originally made with film: redundant technology imaging redundant industry.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.
Packer received his MFA at Florida State University in 1994. He’s a former Fulbright Research Scholar and his work has appeared in Chicago, Pittsburgh, New York, Tokyo and Morocco.
Above image: Exhibition shot from Toil by David Packer at the Curatorium in Hudson.
Exhibition shots from Toil by David Packer at the Curatorium in Hudson.
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