Artist Kelly Packer brought a little piece of Montana to Whitworth University. On the walls surrounding a bustling crowd of art and architecture students, a gallery of paintings displayed homes from Butte, Mont.
The work of Packer, in her words, aims to capture “the recognizable, but as imperfect as a memory.” She does this through capturing the seemingly mundane features of everyday life on the streets of southwestern Montana and memorializing them through oil and acrylic. Packer pairs each artwork with poetry written by her husband, Adrian Kien, to add an extra layer of meaning and sentimentality to each piece.
On Feb. 17, her latest series “Here Living Again Living Here” had its opening reception at Whitworth’s Lied Center for the Visual Arts. The art series, which has been available for viewing since Feb. 3, was given an accompanying talk from Packer.
As the reception began, students flooded in from art classes. They stood in groups or sat on the ground to analyze the paintings, writing their observations in composition notebooks.
Couples came and went arm in arm, observing the paintings and pointing out details to each other. Amongst them, with a constant group of professors and students around her, was Packer.
Work inspired by artists like Francis Bacon and James Lavadour, Packer’s art mostly consists of using the color and impressionism of these artists to render the streets of Butte onto canvas.
Her painting, entitled “Once is all gone upon,” acrylic on wood panel, captures a house from Daly Street in Walkerville, a neighborhood of Butte. The house is lit blue by a bright, expansive sky, while the sidewalk is paneled orange and red bleeding out into the foreground of the piece.
This, the most recent of her paintings displayed at Whitworth, is paired with this poem by her husband Adrian Kien.
“Once is all gone upon
An apron pocket tissue
The afternoon turns to stone
A blueberry
A running smear of bruise across
Your finger when you touch
The door to leave.”
After a thorough analysis and a lap of the gallery, the crowd flowed out to eat the hors d’oeuvres and talk with the faculty gathered in the lobby.
Her talk, accompanied by slides with photos of her various works and inspirations, discussed the course of her artistic career. Packer grew up in Missoula, Mont., and attended the University of Montana. She received her BFA with a focus in Painting and a minor in Media Arts, an applied digital art program that she took for the purpose of expanding her career possibilities.
This minor turned into her day job as a web developer.
“I was really lucky in that my day job is web development, and that I don’t have to rely on artwork for sustaining my family and putting food on the table,” said Packer, “For me, that’s really worked out.”
Her early work through undergrad in Missoula was at many guerrilla galleries.
“We would also take over alleys on a first Friday and just put up artwork and not ask and just do what we wanted,” said Packer.
This exploration led to the meeting of her performance artist and would-be husband, Kien.
Packer and Kien formed a symbiotic artistic relationship, feeding each other’s work to inspire their own.
“I think titles are so hard for artists, and so us being able to do that, it just adds so much to the work in general,” said Packer.
They have collaborated all the way through the present, with his poems accompanying her paintings even here on the Whitworth campus.
In every work the two collaborated on, they shared a common goal of memorializing the seemingly mundane pieces of their environment.
“What I do all the time is take everyday things and sort of refract them and try to add more to them and then get an essence out of them,” said Packer.
This seeking of essence goes back to the core goal of her display here at Whitworth, in which she aims to capture the streets of Butte over the course of 11 years and create the feeling that you are looking at a memory. Through Packer’s eyes, the people of Whitworth were able to see the homes of Montana and share in the making of memories.
