Matthew Choberka: The experience of looking
Matthew Choberka is a painter and professor of art at Weber State University.
"Dark Forest I," oil, acrylic and enamel on canvas, 2019, by Matthew Choberka. This piece is currently part of the exhibit "I Know Some Nice People" currently on display at The Argo House.
”Artists respond to the world in which they live, and our world is conflicted, complex and ever-changing,” said artist Matthew Choberka.
Choberka, an Ogden-based painter and professor of art/chair of the Department of Visual Art & Design at Weber State University, says his art ambition is to create abstract contemporary history paintings that embody the complexity of our times.
“My painting addresses the instability and complexity of the contemporary world,” he stated. “The images are autonomous on their own terms — I hope — but interrelated in an ongoing argument with myself about the know-ability of the other, and even to the self.”
Monsters inhabit the works of his current exhibit, “I Know Some Nice People,” at The Argo House in Ogden, characters that depict what he refers to as a “response to what I see as damaging forces at work in our society.”
“Contemporary art is as likely to deal in various ways with sociology, technology, political issues and language as with skills and abilities,” Choberka said.
An artist currently represented at A Gallery/Allen+Alan Fine Art in Salt Lake City and whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, Choberka emphasizes the value of individual responses to the world in his teaching style. “I tend to think of ‘sensibility’ as much more important than skills or techniques, and certainly more important than questions of talent,” he said.
According to Choberka, many contemporary artists are discipline-specific and focused on particular media, while others tend to lead with ideas and then employ the tools and techniques those ideas demand. The latter is how he and colleagues at WSU approach teaching and supporting their art students, by helping them think through the technical, formal and conceptual implications of their ideas.
It was an artist and teacher named Joseph Mann at Columbia College in Chicago in the early ’90s who introduced Choberka to the idea that painting as an art practice was still “vital, active and dynamic” in the contemporary world. “He showed me the work of Lucian Freud, a great then-living realist painter, and it just clicked for me that people were doing this work in ways that reflected modern experience,” he said.
Mirroring back his own experience drives Choberka to paint. In his own words, he does it “to try to make sense, in some small way, of my experience. It’s a kind of processing or even meditation in that way.”
There is a misconception that contemporary art is unreachable or difficult to interpret, or that there is something one must “get” when looking at a piece. “Contemporary artists aren’t pulling your leg or trying to make their work inscrutable just for the hell of it,” Choberka said. “Contemporary art is complex, highly varied in its concerns, materials and processes in large part because it is responding to those conditions in the world.”
For Choberka, it’s the unfamiliarity and new questions being asked that he responds to most. “It’s a misunderstanding of art that it was ever just a question of ‘reproducing images of stuff that already exists,'” he said.
“I always encourage people to look at all art, contemporary or otherwise, with a recognition that the artists are bringing a complex array of associations and understandings to bear, and that audiences need to do the same, bringing their own knowledge, and even questions, to the experience of looking,” he said.
In Ogden since being hired at WSU in 2005, Choberka has a studio at The Monarch and lives with his family nearby in the Nine Rails Creative District. “It’s amazing to see the development of the community, particularly lately, in terms of the Nine Rails Arts District, etc.,” he said. “And of course, the relationship of the people to the natural world makes this place different to most others I have lived in.”
Painting in oil and acrylic continues to be a major part of Choberka’s artistic practice with the addition of digital painting, which has become an important aspect of his work over the past four years.
Choberka said the monsters of “I Know Some Nice People” first emerged in 2015-2016 in response to politics at that time, and that they’ve only become more relevant since then.
This summer, he plans to learn some basic digital animation — “It seems time for some of these monsters I am painting to get to move around a little, kind of stretch their legs,” he said.
Choberka’s “I Know Some Nice People” exhibit can be seen at The Argo House through the end of April.