20/20 vision. 2020 year. 20 divided from 20. slogan what are you looking at now / what /how will you see in 20/20? a closer lookWhatever your question, we’ve got an answer. IF you see division (20/20) or unity (20/20 = 1), we’ve got the answer.

Nikon
Peter Lyons
2019, oil on panel, 16 x 12 in.

Matthew Swift Gallery is pleased to present 20/20: What are you looking at?, an exhibition which invites you to take a closer look. What have visual artists been thinking and doing as 2020 approaches? What art will you be living with in 2020?

Selected works in the exhibition are shown below. The exhibition is subject to revision as availability evolves. Please contact the gallery to confirm whether a particular work of art remains available.

We are very pleased to be showing more work by artists Timothy Harney and Jeffrey Marshall and to be showing mixed-media wall sculptures by Kim Radochia for the first time.

Museum educator Annie Storr will offer a fascinating guided session of looking at the exhibition In with the New on Sunday, January 28th, at 3:00pm. The special nature of her program brings insights to beginners and art professionals alike. The session is free, very informal, and no reservation is needed.

— Heraclitus, fragment DK B88

Spring is a time of birth and renewal, and a time to reflect on rhythms, rituals, motifs, and ideas which bind the past, the ancient, and the contemporary.

How can there be permanence, how can there be identity, in the ceaseless flux of time?

Trident Gallery is is pleased to present In the Time We Have, an exhibition of new and selected works of art reflecting themes of time, ephemerality, and maturity.

Among the works presented for the first time at Trident are an elegant steel sculpture by Ruth Mordecai, Between Drawing And Sculpture / Torso (1995); a pair of witty assemblages by Ken Riaf; and a powerful new mixed media work on paper by Susan Erony called Flight. Especially in the context of this exhibition, the butterfly wings embedded in Flight and the graceful arcs of the composition make this piece, for me, a poignant meditation on regeneration and renewal, beautiful and hopeful amidst the sadness of loss.

The wall texts for this exhibition are included in the slideshow below. They are sequences of short, lyrical phrases which capture elements of my current responses to these works of art. They are intended to be personal and provocative, inviting further reflection and response to the art from the reader — responses perhaps dissonant, or in counterpoint or harmony.

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.

Favorites brings together a selection of twenty-two black-and-white and five color photographs by Lynn Swigart, which are among the artist’s favorites from his distinguished career.

Lynn Swigart’s photographs offer visual delight without sentimentality or pretension. His eye for abstract beauty does not submerge but instead completes and elevates the human reality of the scene. This vision gives us works of art in which solitude and communion become united and indistinguishable, moments of contact between permanence and impermanence. “You, too, have this marvelous world passing before you,” say these photographs — a cherubic face with an infectious smile, a boy’s joyful stride with a balloon, a moon discovered in a metal tank, a cobbler at work, a turn on an empty carousel.

Lynn Swigart was born in Kansas City MO in 1930 and spent his youth in Clinton IL. He began working as a professional photographer in 1951 and has studied with photographers Minor White, George Tice, and Gus Kayafas. He began photographing in Gloucester in 1976 as he began work on a project that resulted in the book Olson’s Gloucester (LSU Press, 1980) and an associated exhibition which toured the country. Swigart’s photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, and his work has been collected by prestigious institutions, including the Center for Creative Photography, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, the Stanford University Museum, the Illinois State Museum, and the Cape Ann Museum.

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.