In Plain Sight

Petalia Humphreys, Wilma Tabacco, and Stephen Wickham

May 2nd – 24th, 2025

Stephen Wickham and I have exchanged ideas, curated group exhibitions and exhibited together over so many years that neither of us wish to enumerate them. Petalia Humphreys’ works we have only recently and happily discovered.

Obviously, each of us works in various modes within the broad spectrum of historical and contemporary abstraction. That our works have little in common, stylistically and conceptually, is in plain sight.

Manifesting any ideas in pictorial form requires a delicate and often fraught poise between knowledge and intuition.  Because all art works are ontologically ineffable, abstract ones particularly so, explaining the works selected for this exhibition is counter intuitive.  To  compress and reconfigure images and objects into words does not necessarily clarify the artist’s purpose nor make the work itself any more (or less) appealing.  If anything, the artist’s written word becomes the dominant conduit for experiencing the work.  Artists cannot anticipate how their works will be perceived by any individual, let alone ‘en masse’.

The Treachery of Images (René Magritte, 1929) illustrates the troubled relationship between words and images. Magritte’s painted text tells us that his painted pipe is not a pipe but a representation of a pipe. The words are accurate, but the painting of the pipe is a thing the words do not explain. The paradox is left for the viewer to sort out.

In a comparable line of thought, this artist’s statement is not an artist statement. The lie here is obvious; the truth perhaps less so.

Wilma Tabacco 2025