Karen Chambers wrote:

It’s rare that I’m taken with an art exhibition with text, but Ann Pachner’s work appeals on both a formal and intellectual level. In her Text Boxes, white words appear on clear panes of glass set in unfinished , but carefully crafted boxes. Making no claim to be a poet, the texts come to Pachner when in a meditative state. They have the quality of haiku if not the form and require concentration and attention just as the white letterforms on the clear glass do. Behind the glass the grain of the wood becomes a formal element playing against the lettering in front of it. A portfolio of the texts on a translucent paper is available for those interested in the words. I preferred the experience of standing, seeing the letters materialize, smelling the fresh wood.

Accompanying these boxed poems are delicate graphite drawings of leaves. They certainly don’t illustrate the words, but derive from the same impulse and require the same quiet state to apprehend.

     The chill is in the air. The beautiful yellow

     overtaking the green.

     The leaf would fall, spiral into the stream

     and find it’s way home.

That is a fragment of a poem that is adjacent to a large framed drawing of leaves tumbling through space. Other drawings are more abstract, like Pat Steir’s cascading paintings. In narrow, three inch and eight foot tall frames, there are long scribbles. 

Rapunzel-like falls of braided ropes of hair. There are 11 boxes ending with a long strip of those falling leaves. She intends them as an installation and calls it Drawing Drawer/Behind. These seem most related to the experience that inspired this new body of work for the artist who had been involved with wood sculpture. In her gallery statement she writes of seeing cords of water, not drops, as flowing from an infinite source, just as her drawings appear.

Pachner is an old-fashioned multi-media artist - poet, sculptor, draughtswoman - but the impact is very much of the moment.