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.

On Labor Day Weekend, 2016, as the city celebrates its maritime heritage during the Schooner Festival, Gloucester·Center will produce “The Deep Sea Has its Stars,” an inaugural event of art installation and performance.

Full information about the events and the concept is available at the Gloucester·Center web site at http://Gloucester.Center.

Producers

See below for short bios.

Emily Beattie

Emily Beattie is a Somerville based dance artist, experimental choreographer, and educator melding performance, interactive media, and film. She is an accomplished performer and her collaborative works have been supported nationally and internationally. This year Emily will be teaching at Endicott College and Walnut Hill School for the Arts as well as finishing an interactive dance experience with designer Eric Gunther and an immersive solo about an orca whale with wild artist cari ann shim sham. emilybeattie.com

photo: Julieta Cervantes

Alexandra Berger

A Brooklyn-based freelance dancer, Alexandra Berger has had the privilege of working with, among others, Pat Catterson, Merce Cunningham (RUG 2007), Douglas Dunn, Roz Newman, Dusan Tynek Dance Theatre (Founding member & Artistic Associate), and Matthew Westerby. Alexandra holds a BFA from The New School.

Andy Bergman

Andy Bergman is a multi-instrumentalist, composer, and recording artist who plays clarinet, saxophones, and a variety of other woodwind and percussion instruments. His playing is grounded in classical technique and his musicality informed by years of work with a wide range of ensembles: from orchestras and theater pits to bands playing afrobeat, soul, rock, folk, reggae, and jazz. Andy’s growing list of credits includes appearances at the Chicago World Music Festival, Oslo World Music Festival, Festival Mawazine (Morocco), Cully Jazz Festival (Switzerland), Ashkenaz Festival (Toronto), Philadelphia Folk Festival, Boston Celebrity Series, and many other venues across North America and Europe. andybergman.com

photo: bluelime photography

Kristen Miller

Kristen Miller uses her cello and improvisatory skills to tell sound-stories of life, people, and places where words leave off. She enjoys using new and old technology and techniques to perform live, as well as recording in the studio on hundreds of projects of both solo and collaborative work. Kristen’s favorite new project is exploring far reaches of sound, melody, and spaces with dancer Sarah Slifer Swift. kristenmillermusic.com

Sarah Slifer Swift

Gloucester-based Sarah Slifer Swift is a dance artist and producer of experimental performance projects as Director of the Trident Live Art Series. Her choreographic work is informed and inspired by inter-media collaboration and site-specific environment, and has been recognized by several grants and Fellowships. She teaches dance in the Gloucester Public School System through support from the Gloucester Education Foundation, and also at The Boston Ballet School.

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 announce The Art of Natural History, an exhibition reprising last year’s winter partnership with the Museum of American Bird Art at Mass Audubon in Canton, Massachusetts, the home of Mass Audubon’s remarkable collection of art.

This year’s exhibition features eight exquisitely detailed watercolor paintings by Robert Verity Clem (1933–2010) from the Museum’s collection of over thirty. Six of Clem’s paintings were part of Winter Meditations, including two never before seen in public. Trident Gallery donated frames in order to display them. This year’s selection of eight includes the Northern Shrike shown last year and a new painting never seen before in public, a gouache of Sanderlings also painted in the late 1960s and sharing the minimalist aesthetic of Northern Shrike. Here is one heartfelt tribute to Clem which gives some idea of his reputation among natural history artists.

Also on display from the Museum’s collection will be four small sculptures by Larry Barth (b. 1957). Larry Barth is considered by many to be the preeminent contemporary bird sculptor. A brief bio is here.

This year again, by popular demand, artist Sandy McDermott will lead a drawing workshop on Drawing at Trident Gallery on drawing wildlife from nature 1–3pm Friday, Feburary 27th. See below for more information

And once again, complementing the Museum’s collection within Trident Gallery will be works of art for sale: a selection of meticulous and fascinating drawings and new photography by Charlie Carroll, watercolors of birds by Marion Hall, and drawings by Gabrielle Barzaghi and Susan Erony.

Director Matthew Swift has curated The Art of Natural History with two organizing ideas. The first is Charles Darwin’s famous closing paragraph of On The Origin of Species, in which the figure of an “entangled bank” testifies eloquently to the extraordinary complexity and interdependency of the natural world:

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

The second organizing idea is for the art in the exhibition to straddle the boundary between documentation and interpretation of the natural world, between dispassionate observation and emotional responses (such as seeing “grandeur in this view of life”), between rationality and human desires. What first appears to be a boundary is on closer inspection a zone, a liminal territory in which all that we may discover reveals something essential about human nature—the territory in common of art, theology, and science.

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.

“The cycle of seasons is deeply imprinted in human consciousness; it matters to everyone and has meaning for all. The idea behind Winter Meditations is to remind ourselves how engaging with art deepens our experience of life by drawing forth our own creativity. Good art has the power to enlarge our views, develop our sensibilities, and fuel our spiritual journeys, but viewing art becomes a dry exercise if we lose touch with the experience of art as a creative act itself. I want to mount an exhibition which emphasizes the pleasure and creativity in the viewer’s experience of art, rather than the goal of grasping the artist’s unique gifts and vision, which though important can distract us from the reasons we value the hard work of artists so highly in the first place; the reasons we choose to bring art into our homes, schools, and workplaces; the deep, human reasons why stories, images, movement, and music matter.”

— Matthew Swift, Director

From Friday, January 24th, through Sunday, March 2nd, Trident Gallery is proud to host a loan from the Massachusetts Audubon Museum of American Bird Art of more than thirty prints, paintings, and miniature sculptures by the renowned and important artists John James Audubon, Milton Avery, Andy Warhol, Allen James King, Robert Verity Clem, Lars Jonsson, and others. All the works of art depict bird species present on Cape Ann in winter, and their exhibition constitutes a new extension to the Cape Ann Winter Birding Weekend (Friday–Sunday, 31 January – 2 February) a festival which celebrates the winter bird life of Cape Ann, especially those Arctic species rarely encountered farther south. Sponsored by Mass Audubon and the Cape Ann Chamber of Commerce, the event draws several hundred participants to hear expert presentations and embark on bus tours and a boat trip to see the birds. A birding guide for the event in past years, Director Swift has this year orchestrated the festival’s new art component at Trident Gallery.

Works of art by Gabrielle Barzaghi, Winston Boyer, Charlie Carroll, Susan Erony, Dennis Flavin, Eileen Mueller, Joe Poirier, and Lynn Swigart will be on display during the entirety of Winter Meditations. In the final phase, Persephone’s Return, additional works of art by these and other Trident Gallery artists will take the place of the departing Mass Audubon winter bird art.

First come, first served. Bring your intellectual appetite, moral cravings, and spiritual hunger, and find satisfaction in art, which may be taken home immediately to nourish families, invigorate infants, and revitalize the elderly. Art is wholesome and recommended for all living, loving beings.