GearBox Gallery: Gina Gaiser & Sarah Newton
May 5 – June 4, 2022
Image left: Sarah Newton, New Chicago Marsh, (elev. 3 ft), Brown & blue ink, gouache, chalk on tan paper, 20”x30”, 2019
Image right: Gina Gaiser, Los Altos Park, Albuquerque, cut out photograph, 16”x20”, 2022
GearBox Gallery, 770 W Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94612, Open Th-Fr-Sa 12-5 pm & First Friday 5-8 pm
I’m so proud of this exhibition of new work with Sarah M. Newton. We both are inspired by the landscape and curiously document transitional places, and the effect of humans and climate on the environment.
“The locations feel vacant of human life, but full of its infrastructure.” -Matthew Harrison Tedford, Article: An Artist Features the Bay’s “Transitional” Spaces, Bay Nature Magazine. 2019
Gaiser’s aerial photographs, taken from a plane window looking down on metropolitan and suburban places, allow us to see the fabricated landscapes from above. She wondered what the photos would look like without the houses, so she cut them out. The white space is what’s missing, mostly the housing developments and retail establishments, referencing the inaccessibility for many people to own a home and be a part of that community.
“Planned and unplanned landscapes, the way in which we build structures, occupy space, and travel from place to place: the things that Gaiser documents move, are temporary.” -Mary Corbin, Article: Smoky air, social distancing: Gina Gaiser chronicles subtle moments of our now, 48hills, Feb 16, 2022
Newton’s drawings are an exploration of the proposed San Francisco Bay Trail, following the shoreline along the map of the planned 500-mile path that currently exists in discontinuous pieces. She finds these endpoints where the trail hits the zones of construction, industry and restricted areas which prevent the trail sections from being connected. Maps can tell one story of the future of the shoreline, but there is another understanding to be found in intimate familiarity with the changing margin of the land and the water that surrounds us.
"Newton studies the ‘shifting … marginal zone’ between the bay and adjacent developed land. Her meticulously detailed ink drawings and gouache/chalk/ink paintings reveal and revel in the beauty of the peripheral and overlooked." -DeWitt Cheng, review of "Sea Change" at the Brower Center, 2019
Recording of Artist Talk: Gina Gaiser & Sarah Newton, May 21, 2022