Jennifer Packer: The Eye Is Not Satisfied With Seeing

For Packer, a painting can honor a life: Her largest painting to date is connected to the violent death of Breonna Taylor at the hands of the Louisville, Kentucky, police. The photographs of Taylor’s home that surfaced in the media, and on which this work is based, strongly resonated with Packer; many of the details that she observed in the images evoked objects that might have existed in the artist’s own home—connecting her implicitly to Taylor. “I’m interested in the co-dependency of humans existing in spaces,” the artist has stated. “I’m interested in the environment as much as the figures that sit within it.”

On the night of March 13, 2020, Louisville police officers entered the home of twenty-six-year-old Breonna Taylor and shot her five times. Ignoring standard procedure, they offered her no medical treatment. Although the officers later claimed they had been investigating a drug case, no drugs were found in the apartment, and they left their incident report almost totally blank. Both Taylor’s killing and a grand jury’s decision not to indict the officers sparked widespread protests—to this day, no one has been charged for her death. Taylor’s family and many in her community continue to fight for justice.