artist statement

This current body of work, “Position Papers”, engages the instability and complexity of the contemporary world, by way of a serial approach to the image that hybridizes the languages of drawing and painting. The images are autonomous, whole on their own terms, and yet function together in a de-centered dialogue, maybe even an argument, in which structures fight for stability within fields of color and light, forms emerge and wane, in a search for a language to embody the world. My address to the issues of power, conflict, and uncertainty are, and must be, allusive and metaphoric, as well as discursive.

Incorporating ink, graphite, colored pencil, and acrylic paint on paper, and predicated on an interplay between abstraction and representation, the pictures are as dependent upon the sense of touch as on the faculty of sight. The abrasive movement of the pen, the rhythmic buildup a pencil marks, and the sweep of the brush condition the realization of the image. In this sense I feel my way through the pictures. Found within these movements are echoes of war, and though the pictures are far from overtly political, they have become filled with my unease with the world that I face, and that my children will inherit. Fundamentally, the content of my work has become an attempt to find a place for myself in the world. Emotions like apprehension and anger, tempered with a kind of hopefulness have informed recent works. I work to confront both my identification with humanity, and my (sometime) dissatisfaction with it.

Equally interesting to me in these new works are the ways in which they assert both affirmation and negation. The images seem to follow a progression, but they do not comprise a narrative. Forms gesture and move, but they are not figures. Spaces can be navigated and lived in, but they correspond to no known place. What emerges finally is not representation, but presentation, pictures of that which could not be seen in any other way.
– matthew choberka

matthewchoberka.com
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