While our focus at Matthew Swift Gallery is not explicitly regional, the physical place of Gloucester MA and its remarkable legacy in the arts has in one way or another influenced the work of most of the gallery’s artists. Many have lived in or adjacent to Gloucester, and others have a significant connection to the place — a friend, a family member, a father’s place of work.

Gloucester’s influence does not always lead an artist to represent the place, but often it does, and with this exhibition, Matthew Swift Gallery is taking time to acknowledge and celebrate the city and region of Gloucester MA and its heritage, past and present, in all the arts — visual, literary, and more. As you would expect if you follow Matthew Swift Gallery, we have curated this exhibition like our others, requiring more than excellence of craft, valuing the revelations of perspectives one step or several away from the most beaten paths, choosing voices uniquely individual even as they describe a communal landscape and continue the communal conversation that is the living history of art, and seeking works of art which shows us something new and something deeper than the superficial beauty of our shared world that we can see for ourselves, unaided.

Right Here on Paper features work by Zygmund Jankowski, Erma Wheeler, Albert Alcalay, Winston Boyer, Gabrielle Barzaghi, Charlie Carroll, and Jeffrey Marshall. The Gallery is also very pleased to introduce watercolors by Howard Kline, an artist who resided in Rockport for many years and now resides in Arizona.

Opening one week later on August 13, a companion exhibition Vault Room titled Right Here Not on Paper will include works not on paper depicting Gloucester, Massachusetts, and environs.

The Gallery will host an reception in celebration of the artists participating in both exhibitions on Saturday, August 13, 4–6:30pm.

Selected works in the exhibition are shown below.

Trident Gallery’s summer group exhibition offers more than fifty paintings, drawings, photographs, and mixed media works in the genre of landscape—interpreted, here in Gloucester, to include vistas of the coast and sea.

Gallery Director Matthew Swift has chosen the art to represent a diversity of artistic approaches to landscape, from luminism to abstraction, in order to reveal something about the genre as practiced today, and to reveal through contrast the diversity of aesthetic dimensions beyond the real, in which artists create meaning and beauty beyond the satisfactions of representation.

Beyond Real includes major, large scale works by Peter Lyons, Susan Erony, Ed Touchette, Zygmund Jankowski, and Gabrielle Barzaghi. It is also the east coast debut of Winston Boyer‘s Ocean Series of large scale photographs of sea horizons, works of art in dialogue with the paintings of past Gloucester summer visitor Mark Rothko. Exceptional older works by Albert Alcalay, Nell Blaine, and Roger Martin, and selected recent works by Eileen Mueller, Ruth Mordecai, Pamela Ellis Hawkes, Patti Sullivan, Lynn Swigart, Joe Poirier, Dennis Flavin, and Charlie Carroll complete the exhibition.

A full catalog with artists’ statements and critical commentary is available online and in the gallery.

Trident Gallery is pleased to present Harbortown 2014, an exhibition celebrating Gloucester Harbor and the area’s legacy of more than 150 years of excellence in the visual arts.

Harbortown 2014 proudly displays works of art by eighteen Cape Ann artists, including four guest artists, and introduces Gloucester artist Ed Touchette, now represented by Trident Gallery.  Complementing the exhibition, specially selected additional works of art by these artists will be available to view in the gallery on request.

“I want this exhibition to invite us to look at Gloucester, the city which grew up around a harbor on this rocky extremity of Massachusetts,” says Gallery Director Matthew Swift.  “Gloucester has been a port city for four centuries.  Recently, downtown embraced a new name for itself, Harbortown, when it received state recognition as a cultural district.  What does this say about who we are today?”

“Living by the sea in Gloucester, we see horizons, grand perspectives that offer more than can be understood, giving us a way — a salty, tempestuous way — to think about the twin horizons of the past and the future.  We came from the sea long ago, most of us as immigrants, all of us much earlier as walking fish; and in another few centuries, our city at the edge of the continent may be back under the sea.”

This exhibition is about these ideas and others — it is about what some of today’s artists here are thinking about and saying.”

Gloucester Harbor is America’s oldest seaport.

Trident Gallery is located in the heart of downtown Gloucester and the Harbortown Cultural District.

Trident Gallery’s inaugural exhibition shows the work of twelve artists representing the excellence and variety of contemporary fine art on Cape Ann.

Gallery Director Dr. Matthew Swift has assembled 39 works of art that explore ideas of “home,” a theme he will examine in programmed discussions, gallery conversations, and written materials.

• Home is a point of departure and a place of return.
• Home is the place of one’s dwelling or nurturing — Gloucester, Cape Ann, the United States, the planet Earth.
• Home is the seat of one’s domestic life and overlapping communities; it is a place of safety and comfort.
• Home is a target, the destination of a creative mind striving to think, to forge meaning, to provoke, to pay homage, to become beautiful.