From Sphere to EDGE, late summer in Gloucester is full of arts and events at Trident Gallery and in the community.
Our packed calendar below begins and ends with remarkable art installations in two of our most important historic buildings, the White-Ellery House, and the Tarr and Wonson Paint Factory, in partnership with two of Gloucester's most treasured organizations, the Cape Ann Museum and Ocean Alliance.
Please note that the Sphere installation takes place TOMORROW ONLY, Saturday, August 5, 11am - 3pm.
These bookends are fitting: performances and installations at Trident Gallery are free and open to the public, but when we bring installation and performance out into the community, I feel we enter the realm of public art, an active force within the community instead of merely available to it.
The arts are the visible cloak of the bonds -- both empowering and restricting -- of community and heritage. The cloak of the arts reveals the shape of the present, bears the patterns and must of the past, and declares ourselves on our journey into the future.
We hope you will come in to see Nadine Boughton's exhibition of witty, timely, genre-defying collages, Where I Come From, on view through August 13. Her recent presentation was revealing and inspiring -- look for a video of it here to be posted within the next 24 hours.
Then after a few days to transition, we are very excited to be presenting Ed Touchette: New Construction. We've changed our former title of this exhibition after deeper reflection on Touchette's profound engagement with ideas of architecture in his painting. The artist and I are planning a multi-media presentation on August 27 which shares directly with the audience some of the primary sources of his inspiration in music, poetry, architecture, and visual art.
On Saturday, August 26, the day before Touchette's presentation, MAGMA will hold its Grand Opening event. MAGMA -- Movement Arts Gloucester MA -- will be a center for movement practices where people of all ages can discover, develop, and create within in a broad curriculum of movement styles. It will also be well-equipped as a performance space, and will become the new venue for Trident Live Art Series events which are not intimately connected with the art on the gallery walls.
Closing out our calendar is EDGE, a weekend of art installation and performance at the Paint Factory featuring a unique inter-media staging of the musical work "Down to the Sea in Ships," by composer Robert J. Bradshaw.
|
 |
|
11am - 3pm
 Sphere
White-Ellery House
245 Washington Street, Gloucester
The Trident Live Art Series moves off-site in partnership with the Cape Ann Museum to present Sphere, a performative installation for the historic White-Ellery House in Gloucester, built in 1710.
In this installation, Trident Live Art Series Director Sarah Slifer Swift explores women's social and political power through the lens of the historic house. Using movement, film, and sound, performers will examine the complexities of labor, value, and respect, as they have been gained, lost, or changed over time.
Thirteen live performers.
Two dance videos.
Displayed texts old and new.
Free and open to the public.
+ + +
INSIGHTS ON SITE
An ongoing series of one-day contemporary art installations at the Historic White-Ellery House
The White-Ellery House, located at 245 Washington Street in Gloucester at the Route 128 Grant Circle Rotary, was built in 1710 and is one of just a handful of First Period houses in Eastern Massachusetts that survives to this day. Unlike other structures of this period, the largely unfurnished house has had very few interior alterations over the years. Stepping inside today, visitors enter much the same house they would have 300 years ago. Parking is available off Poplar Street in the field behind the house.
|
Nadine Boughton
Where I Come From
through Sunday, August 13
Nadine Boughton spends months developing each of her extraordinary collages. In the process, she draws on decades of committed engagement with fine art photography, indigenous cultures, therapeutic practices, and the history of psychological inquiry. Her meticulous craftsmanship and the human depth of her recombinations of vintage print materials from the 1950s and early 1960s take the technique of collage into new territory as they create, in her words, "conversations between personal identity and collective history."
The inescapable familiarity of popular culture interferes with projects of self-knowledge and contact with meaningful universals, but Boughton's brilliantly constructed images penetrate this veil and open portals to essential human nature, releasing warmth and wit together with the inseparable energy of the dangerousness of primal awareness. Thus pierced, what is accurate and profound in popular culture is surprisingly validated as well.
On view are seven new works from Boughton's ongoing series Fortune and the Feminine and works from two new series, The Modess Women, based on a wildly successful ad campaign, and an autobiographical series, Where I Come From, which pays homage to the disappearing material vernacular photographs of family albums.
|
Her blog is a fascinating and informative window into a vibrant world of photography in eastern Mass.
|
| Friday |
10-7 |
| Saturday |
10-7 |
| Sunday |
10-5 |
| Monday |
10-5 |
| Tuesday |
12-5 |
| Wednesday |
12-5 |
| Thursday |
12-5 |
|
|
|
|
Sunday, August 13
6pm - 8pm
Gloucester Speaks
benefit screening
introduced by Matthew Swift
Cape Ann Cinema and Stage
21 Main Street, Gloucester
$25 ticket at the door
light fare and spirits
post-screening conversation
Filmmaker Shep Abbott "Gloucester Speaks" is a one hour documentary portrait of the people of Gloucester at the crossroads between the historic past, the present and the unknown future of this iconic and beloved city. The story will be told through the captivating, sometimes excited, sometimes troubled words of our citizens. The building and opening of the Beauport Hotel will act as a kind of Motif representing the inevitability of change in this, America's first fishing community.
|
|
Saturday, August 19
5pm - 7pm
Ed Touchette
New Construction
Opening Reception
|
Ed Touchette
New Construction
August 19 - September 17
Ed Touchette's latest paintings are often simplified shapes and colors in an energetic composition, establishing a kinetic tension and visual liveliness. Simple painted black lines, which the artist sometimes likens to the runes of an ancient language, also create a remarkable sense of depth and volume.
Others showing more complexity seem like impressionist records of profound architectural wonders, a child-like spirit marveling at a dramatic public monument, a busy construction site, or a bustling city from a high vantage. At the same time, these paintings are also strikingly generative, not recorded impression but the expression of imaginative forces, optimism, delight, and ideas of order.
This duality suggests deep parallels between Touchette's paintings and poetry, which poet Wallace Stevens has described as an interdependence of imagination and reality as equals.
Ed Touchette's paintings are a distillation of creative energy into principled structures. They offer a vision of a chaotic utopia and invite us to participate through aesthetic contemplation and delight.
|
|
Saturday, August 26
MAGMA
grand opening
movement classes for all ages, and the
future venue for many Trident Live Art Series performances
|
|
Sunday, August 27
4pm
Conversation with
Ed Touchette
See above for description.
|
|
Saturday - Monday
September 2-4
EDGE
Ocean Alliance
32 Horton Street, Gloucester
The 2nd Annual Ocean Alliance Labor Day weekend art exhibition and Fundraiser Gala in partnership with Trident Gallery and the Trident Live Art Series will be celebrating contemporary viewpoints of the sea and maritime history on location at the Ocean Alliance Headquarters, the historic Tarr and Wonson Paint Factory. Trident Gallery Director Matthew Swift is curating an art installation Edge for the Paint Factory, which will be on view, free and open to the public, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, hours to be announced. Trident Live Art Series Director Sarah Slifer Swift has invited composer Robert J. Bradshaw and the Beauport Chamber Players, lighting designer Michael Friedman, and dancer Nina Brindamour to create a site-specific staging of Bradshaw's musical work "Down to the Sea in Ships" for the Paint Factory.
"Down to the Sea in Ships" is a piece for strings and narrator about ill-fated whaling captain George Pollard Jr., whose story inspired Herman Melville's Moby-Dick.
In addition to this unique staging of "Down to the Sea in Ships," the Gala event includes delicious food and drink, the art exhibition, and the Parade of Lights and fireworks of the Gloucester Schooner Festival. All proceeds of the fundraiser go to the continued restoration and renovation of the Paint Factory buildings for future dedication to community service uses. More information and tickets will be available soon!
|
|
Saturday, September 2
7:30pm
EDGE
benefit performance
Ocean Alliance
32 Horton Street, Gloucester
see the text above
|
|
|
Trident Gallery
189 Main Street, Gloucester Massachusetts
Trident Gallery shows beautiful and intelligent contemporary art in all mediums, emphasizing the work of artists continuing Gloucester's rich legacy as a center for new American Art. Gallery Director Dr. Matthew Swift curates and produces the exhibitions, drawing on over twenty years of multi-disciplinary scholarship, teaching, and creative exploration.
The Trident Live Art Series presents performances by seasoned professionals showing experimental and collaborative work in the intimate salon setting of the gallery. Live Art Series Director Sarah Slifer Swift curates and produces the performances, drawing on over twenty years of experience in the United States and abroad as a dance artist, choreographer, and producer.
|
|
|
|
|
|
