Jenna Packer paints memorable pictures. Weeks after viewing her survey exhibition of paintings from the last ten years, it is easy to recall the one with the big glasshouse, the one with the hot-air balloon, the one with the labyrinth, the little ones with cars in them and so on. Actually not many artists make ‘masterpieces’ in this way. Yes, it has issues, that word, but it is a useful way of saying that while others might spill gallons of paint without achieving anything more than consistency, some of Packer’s pictures stick in the mind - and indeed fill the mind, pleasurably permeating it. Why? They are urgent, I suppose, telling stories that slide between the past, present and future, mixing imaginative projections with uncomfortably close-to-the-bone realities. These are stories about Aotearoa New Zealand, neither nationalistic nor insular, in which people are as we know them - destructive, pitiable and bull-headed. The minotaur, from Ancient Greek myth, is a recurring (too much, for my liking) symbol, a monumental idol. The brute force of the animal merges with human connivance and hunger for colonial and corporate control. In Conversion (2017), the body of the towering statue resembles both scaffolding (a symbol in Shane Cotton’s work too) and the much smaller electricity pylons dotted across a largely treeless scene, which, with a travelling circus or rodeo in the foreground, spans the American frontier and rural New Zealand. The exhibition is perfect for Ashburton, a sprawling, utilitarian, conservative town, fed by the dairy industry (the smaller Manawatu town of Bulls would be a worthy competitor, if it had a similarly superb, spacious, well-run art gallery). Visiting the gallery on a Saturday morning, I wonder if any of the other people looking at the pictures are local farmers, and, if so, what in tarnation they make of them. The artist’s politics are easy to see. But that is only half the story. Although the paintings are representational, even illustrative, crawling with Lilliputian people, cows, cars and boats, they are above all painted (a fact only fleetingly mentioned in much of what has hitherto been written about them) - memorable for how, as well as what, they represent. I remember skies and backgrounds; the alternately dragged and pooled paint in the grey-brown sky of Conversion; the silvery-gold glowing sky of On With the Show (2016) (also the leaves of the foreground trees, which, with their ragged touches, look like they were pleasing to paint); and the rich, dark, smoke-veiled factory wall of Furnace (2017). Packer ‘channels’ painting of the colonial period that is, in part, her subject matter, saying something about materialism through materiality. I remember the staccato composition of Good Mast Year (2024), with felled trees artfully dotted about. And the lush, deep drippingness of the two outer panels of the triptych Sanctum (2019), in contrast with the crisp geometry of the central maze and an almost white sky; a grave, heavy painting made vivid by the dab and streak of brush on board. When someone is said to have a vivid imagination, the implication tends to be that they conceive of improbable things. In some recent works, Packer imagine a post-capitalist future that is eminently credible, where people subsist in campsites put together with leftovers from the age of consumerism - old cars and plastic tarpaulins for shelter, white plastic chairs, metal drums for lighting fires in. In a series of six small paintings (about the size of the cigar-box lids some plein-air painters once used) we see isolated ad hoc lake-or harbour-side settlements. And, in the true ‘masterpiece’ of the show, the large pencil-on-canvas Big Tree (2024), Packer envisages a more extensive community sprawling across a desolate environment, the big open spaces of the off-white canvas leaving room for the viewer’s imagination too. These works are not lyrical and fanciful, but to the point; there is no beating around the bush, and no bull.