Susan Erony
Lost in America

Trident Gallery is very pleased to present Lost in America, an exhibition of new mixed media paintings by Susan Erony. The gallery will host a public reception for the artist on Saturday, October 27, 5–7pm, and will host a conversation with the artist on Saturday, November 10, at 1pm.

Susan Erony’s new paintings explore the idea of visual beauty itself as both a refuge from the trials of life and a visceral demand for the mind’s attention. Like much of her past art, the new paintings engage history and reveal a deeply felt ethical consciousness as they bear witness to the dignity and the achievements of the oppressed, the dispossessed, and all people who face sorrow or pain in the course of life. Her paintings submit to the seduction of beauty, even as they compel viewers, in that safe embrace, to remain mindful of the suffering which makes love and beauty so important.

Erony employs conventional art materials, especially acrylic, in unfamiliar ways that render them strange, and she employs unconventional materials which have conceptual or personal significance. The abstract paintings and those having general subjects bear strong emotions in their organic textures and engage history and ideas through their titles. Other paintings gesture to the universal through the intimate specificity of the subject or the artist’s materials: in Lost in America, viewers will encounter Tycho Brahe’s silver nose, a section of lace sewn by the artist’s grandmother, the words of the transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller, and fragments of the clothing and journal of the artist’s friend who died by his own hand.

The artist and the gallery Director have written commentary on individual works of art in the exhibition. More entries will be added during the run of the exhibition.