Front Room gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of works by Allan Packer. Packer’s extensive and impressive body of work examines elemental and cultural ideas. Packer relates his experiences and travels through large-scale sculptures that revive lesser known cultural ideas. His travels have taken him to the northern regions of the artic circle, cultural centers of Paris and New York, the Rocky mountains, the wilderness of Banff and his ancestral Wales. During his extended stays in these communities Packer broadened his cultural ideas, incorporating those of others into his own.

During a residency in Cape Dorset, Packer immersed himself in the Inuit culture of the region; throughout his work he draws on this experience, incorporating ideas he developed during his stay in the artic. In Packer’s installation “Corvus Corax” two ravens stand amidst stacks of ice-like components, which if put into to place would complete the nearly fully erected igloo. The chronology of the situation Packer has created is left up to question, alluding to the possible past and the potential future of the structure, it is simultaneously in the process of being constructed as it is dissembled.

In Packer’s Celestial Clock he questions our standard way of time keeping, inverting the concept of a hanging wall clock; creating a free-standing sculpture which tracks the passage of time through Julian time. Cast resin ravens perch on levels of aluminum beams which rotate at the same pace used to count the number of days that have passed since the establishment of Universal time. The elegant construction combines industrial materials with elements that reference natural world, unifying the mechanical world of industry’s focus on rigorous time keeping and the less tangible system of the life cycle in nature.