The Brooklyn Rail

Jennifer Packer’s exhibition Dead Letter unfolds as both a collection of works and an act of communication across loss. Packer’s partner, the poet April Freely, passed away four years ago, and the current show, created in the wake of this loss, gathers paintings that move between presence and disappearance, between figuration and abstraction. Packer’s figures arrive and dissolve within deeply saturated fields of color. These expansive hues serve as both environments for meditation and objects of contemplation. In and of themselves, these spaces hold the viewer within an intense depth of feeling.

The familiar warmth of Packer’s palette, with its reds, pinks, oranges, and yellows, permeates the exhibition. These fields of warm hues are quickly complicated by layers of cool colors, contour lines, and interruptions that redirect the gaze. Packer paints representation as a verb; she is painting towards an image, showing us all the stops, starts, and avenues of awareness that occur along the way. Arrival at an endpoint is never an inevitability.

In Warp, Weft (2025), Packer constructs a scene from a deep blue ground overlaid with loosely applied red. Two figures, a piano, and portraits emerge and retreat in this layered field. The interplay between background and foreground—between what is seen and what obscures—creates a vertiginous sense of pictorial instability. The unseen portraits behind the central figures become spectral presences, echoes of the foregrounded silhouettes. In the thrum of chromatic vibration, I am reminded that art is ritual, and with this, we are offered a space to heal. Here, color overwhelms color and gesture consumes form. Two perfectly rendered feet touch the ground; they are subtly posed, defining the body’s relationship to this earthly plane. Meanwhile, the figure drifts upward and away into flattened space. Here, Packer places attention on the particular point of connection with the ground, making her specificity felt rather than read. In doing so, she avoids simplistic conceptions of identity.

This tension between definition and expansiveness is a central concern of Dead Letter. Strict and circumscribing lines risk visualizing overdetermined attitudes towards the limits of personhood; Packer’s refusal to fix clear boundaries allows her to destabilize the canvas instead. Her method becomes a way of speaking with absence, acknowledging the instability of how bodies are held—and how death and omission remain an ever-present part of representation.

In her book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe describes the problem of containment:

As we go about wake work, we must think through containment, regulation, punishment, capture, and captivity and the ways the manifold representations of blackness become the symbol, par excellence for the less-than-human being condemned to death. We must think about Black flesh, Black optics, and ways of producing enfleshed work; think the ways the hold cannot and does not hold, even as the hold remains in the form of the semiotics of the slave ship hold, the prison, the womb, and elsewhere in and as the tension between being and instrumentality that is Black being in the wake.

While much of Packer’s work draws us into the intimacy of holding and being held—of gaining and losing support—Sharpe reminds us that there are causes and conditions that give rise to the very states of grief that these paintings grapple with.

In one small work, this hold becomes more intimate; in Anechoic Chamber (2025), one figure reaches out to another, fingers resting on a shoulder. This subtle interaction is layered, rubbed away, and painted back in again. This soundless room suggests a deeper, unseen set of relations—the microcosmic dialogue which underscores all of life.

The microcosmic reappears in At The Edges of Longing Is An Impossible Communication (Dead Letter) (2025), where Packer paints a vast periodic table that undergirds the entire composition—an organizational system naming the invisible elements that compose our world. Color weaves in and out of this structure, yellows and blues layered with a deep burgundy figure hovering at the center. These ghostly presences point to smaller moments and motifs scattered throughout the work: a press release, playing cards, records, and so on. These punctums reference methods of translation. Packer is letting us know that this type of information can only bring us to the edge of the knowable world, while the medium of paint connects us to what is left unknown, unseen, and unspoken.

Throughout Dead Letter, Packer’s layering—of paint, gesture, and meaning—mirrors the temporal complexity of mourning. Moments of revelation puncture the surface but never fully resolve it. A painted phone number, a half-formed figure, a field of color: each points toward communication that never quite arrives. Packer invites us to linger in this in-between space, to dwell with the material presence of what remains. By staying with the medium, we are invited to sit with loss, and through the act of returning, to emerge into the unexpected.