Swift Gallery

Stunning gallery space. The wide open spaces are condusive for contemplating the artwork. The lighting is great and so complimentary to each painting. It definitely is a place worth going to.

Showcases San Diego painters with large open walls and halls. Every show I’ve seen there has been wonderful — either inspiring, intriguing, surprising — something! Open house and receptions for the artists occur about every three months. Curator Wes Chester does an amazing sensitive job. It is a public gallery — meaning no pressure to buy and it is open every day except major holidays.

I’ve attended 3 art exhibits at Swift Gallery & each show was a local San Diego artist. There are very few galleries in SD that exhibit local high quality art. This Gallery is a welcome & much needed addition to the local art scene. Great receptions are an added bonus.

My experience of Liberty Station or the Promenade as an old Navy Training Center from what I can gather has the potential to become an upcoming thriving district with all its variety of shops and space still available with ample parking. That’s right I said parking.
I saw a flyer at a local community art show called the «Garage» for the «Martha Pace Swift Gallery» advertising an upcoming show James Watts and it was about storytelling and myths. I was impressed by the extensive amount of work to hang all those pieces. I enjoyed the flow of the exhibition, as I was not crammed into one room but allowed to walk freely throughout the show. Their was no loud music drowning out the great conversations I got to have that night. Modern art shows at times can appear like a rave where the scene is more happening than the art really is. Great Show, I look forward to seeing more shows, making more new friends from their and having a great dinner downstairs at Solare or just coffee around the corner.

Liberty Station itself is a mishmash of older buildings and some new construction set along a grid, offering meandering walkways connecting buildings filled with retail, restaurants, service providers, and non-​profits. In a word, it is weird. Walking from one building to another you can find a juice bar, a pilates emporium, and offices for weird sounding programs with some sort of public enhancing mission (sounds like a scam… how do I get in on that?).
The Swift Gallery suffers from the mishmash. Its space is ill defined. We were here recently for the inaugural show and found that the maze-​like space detracted from the uneven work of the painter being showcased. First some work was hung in a hallway that serves as interior access for a neighboring restaurant. A hubbub filtered down from the space above. We climbed the steps where more pieces were hung, but it is difficult to get a feeling of the works when you are mere inches away from them. The stairs opened into a large foyer where more work was hung. A long large hallway contained several more pieces, including a large quadtych, which was broken up to accommodate yet another hallway. Catching a theme here?
Four huge pieces were shoved into a rather small hallway where one accesses a large room where a bevy of relatively smaller pieces clustered on the walls like Titanic refugees clinging to rafts. The hanging of the work was just confusing and did nothing to offer the viewer vantage points from which to appreciate the paintings. I’ve been to a few opening shows and this one seemed to lack a community feeling, perhaps the lighting was far too industrial and not dim enough for my liking? There was a small offering of wine from the restaurant downstairs — they had huge labels on the bottles and there seemed to be a vibe of cross promotion kind of like the first review for this venue.
Calling this place a gallery seems to stretching the definition of the word. It is a nice space, but one can sense it is cobbled together out of forgotten spaces in order to reach for something it can not quite grasp.