Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/960054
NORTHSHOREMAG.COM 60 APRIL 2018 Walk into this Gloucester gallery and you might overhear a conversation about a deposition. at's because Ken Riaf is also a lawyer in general practice and you've likely just stepped into a client's private legal issues, which claim equal priority in this one room law oce/gallery. is is normal for someone like Riaf, a person who has lived many lives— commercial sherman, professor, documen- tary researcher, playwright, lawyer, artist, and gallery owner. In his Law and Water Gallery, Riaf has spent the last two years representing local and regional artists as well as displaying legal ephemera such as handwritten documents and 99-year-old leases dating back to the early 1900s. On the gallery website, he writes: "Truth and justice themed art is not just for lawyers, judges and those who toil in its elds, but is for everyone who searches for meaning in the blindfolded eyes of the law." Being out to sea on a scalloper and wielding the law, may seem to be very dierent pursuits, but both have the same eect, says Riaf. "I've come away from these experiences with a rsthand knowledge of what it's like to be mentally and physically exhausted." Riaf grew / I N D E P T H / up traveling between Boston and New York City, since his mother was from Brooklyn, his father from Dorchester. "It's the same neigh- borhood, only 250 miles apart," says Riaf, whose personal love for Gloucester developed during his college years, while visiting his brother who lived there. Trying to put the lure of Gloucester into words isn't easy, says Riaf, even for a writer. "It'd be a long list with plenty of classics, like light and atmosphere, sea and sky, faces, geography and geology, but there's other things that don't have names or words—dark matter or whatever they call it. e space in between the notes, a fog that covers and reveals all at the same time, mirages thrown up on the horizon or echoes over moor and meadow. ere's those things, and, of course, there's lots of bars, too." On a visit to the Pleasant Street storefront that once housed a Western Union oce, I found Riaf featuring the happy work of Gloucester-based photographer Michael Prince. Hopping around like a kid, keen to Riaf makes micro worlds that often contain legal themes, sometimes Gloucester scenes, usually involving word play, but always practically microscopic with subtle humor small enough to fit inside a tiny wooden box. PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOEL LAINO