Description

Trident Gallery is pleased to present When Objects Dream, an exhibition of new drawings by Gabrielle Barzaghi. The fourteen drawings of When Objects Dream sharpen the political edge of Barzaghi's body of work, without losing any of the characteristic power of her drawings to evoke transcendence through the idiosyncratic delicacy of their textures, colors, and gestures. They are virtuoso performances of contemporary drawing practice. Barzaghi's wide-ranging, mythic imagination has become more explicitly historical, and her new fictions barely contain their own political energy. Artifacts from the realms of play and art are freighted with human context and glow with the nearly magical aura of their material histories—these are the objects' dreams. At the same time, narrative distance and nostalgic longing for the naïveté of objects, toys, and animals recontextualize and recolor perceptions of human actions, ambitions, comforts, and pain. Fables have always been a serious form of art. Both intuitive and satirical, they contact both the timeless and the pragmatic and both the collective and the personal as they contrast the simple motivations attributed to others with the complex uncertainties of subjective experience. Barzaghi's visual fables render the tensions of these dualities beautifully. Gabrielle Barzaghi grew up in Rhode Island and graduated from the Boston Museum School. After living and working in Boston's artists' lofts, she moved to Gloucester in the mid-1990s. She taught drawing at the New England School of Art and Design at Suffolk University for over thirty years and now works full time in her studio adjacent to Dogtown. Barzaghi's drawings combine imagination with close observation and often draw deeply on the artist's personal history. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Currier Museum; the Fuller Museum; and it is in the permanent collections of the Cape Ann Museum and the deCordova Museum. The Artist's R