Opening Reception:
Thursday, April 10, 5:00pm – 8:00pm
Artist Talk:
Thursday, May 1, 6:30pm – 7:30pm
Shallow Time, Deep Time brings together two artists and friends with very different approaches to landscape painting. Zachary and MacMahon both create layered, complex scenes that describe the multifaceted relationship between people and their physical environment. Each artist is less concerned with creating a faithful representation of a place and more interested in making paintings of parallel natural worlds that reflect and project our desires, identities, memories, origins and fears.
Michael Zachary translates printmaking techniques into hand made marks that replicate the color systems used in both digital images and commercial printing; his process involves a captivating and unique mix of line halftone and CMYK printing. His images are paradoxically both tactile and “digital,” visually specific but simultaneously elusive and dream-like. His paintings start with an amalgamation of images, sketches, photographs, notes and memories. As each line is carefully made and layered, an impression of the landscape takes form. In contemplating his paintings, we consider how far we are from a true understanding of what nature is and just how subjective and incomplete our perceptions truly are.
In Michael MacMahon’s paintings, the landscape is never inert; we threaten it and are threatened by it, we are simultaneously delighted and bewildered by it. We form symbolic and symbiotic relationships with our ecosystems as we engage, re-work and appropriate nature. MacMahon’s vistas are interspersed with and interrupted by fragments and complex geometries that document our interventions but ultimately portray nature’s ambivalence. These interruptions in the picture plane encourage the viewer to consider the landscape as a socially and culturally constructed amalgamation of people, place, necessity, and curiosity. They are places where people from different cultures and communities interact and leave traces of activity, political action and evidence of change.
Michael Zachary grew up in New Hampshire and lives and works in Boston, MA. He holds a BA from Bowdoin College and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. His work is featured regularly in group exhibitions nationally and internationally, most recently at Boston University’s Stone Gallery and Room 68 in Provincetown, MA. In 2024 he was a resident at the Dipper A.I.R program in Billings, MT. He has taught at Northeastern University, The University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and Simmons University and currently teaches painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
Originally from Ireland, New-England based painter Michael MacMahon received his BFA from UMass Dartmouth and his MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited widely in Boston and beyond including recent shows at Dryden Gallery in Providence, RI, Room 68 in Provincetown, MA and the Umbrella Arts Center in Concord, MA where he was also an artist in residence. He is currently a member of the painting & drawing faculty at The School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Trustman Art Gallery hours are 10 AM – 4:30 PM, Monday, Tuesday, Friday, and 10 AM – 7 PM on Wednesday and Thursday. The Gallery is free, open to the public and wheelchair accessible.
The Trustman Art Gallery is located within Simmons University at 300 Fenway, 4th floor, Boston MA 02115. For more information, contact Helen Popinchalk at [email protected].
Find us on Instagram @trustman_gallery.