(Un)tacit

The Provincial presents (Un)tacit with Matthew Choberka, Ian Hagarty & Sam King. Please join us for conversation and an opening reception Thursday, August 10 at 5 pm.

(Un)tacit
(Un)tacit brings together recent paintings by Matthew Choberka, Ian Hagarty, and Sam King. Each of these artists acknowledges the near-inevitable associative capacities of abstraction. Interwoven in their paintings are a host of intentions, impulses, and strategies, each like a point on a spectrum: internal/external, intuitive/rational, accidental/deliberate, brash/restrained, experienced/imagined, revealed/concealed, to name a few. As vectors of action overlap, the notion that painting could ever be reducible to “A vs. B” or “on a scale of one to five...” becomes patently untenable. For these artists, such an entanglement is in fact desirable, for it can yield rich, exuberant paradox.

Tacit typically refers to the unspoken: what is understood need not be expressed. In music, tacit means not played. Surely these paintings can’t be tacit in the latter sense of the word, and they offer no promise of implicit agreement. Yet they do not narrate. They embrace what is not understood, and what they convey is multivalent. Maybe they reflect the world; maybe they’re more of it.

(Un)tacit is on view at The Provincial August 10- 31, with an opening reception Thursday, August 10 at 5 pm. Open by appointment. Please call 231-633-8772