Gearbox Gallery
Contemporary Art
brush & shutter
Patricia Sonnino + Gina Gaiser
June 1 - July 1, 2023
First Friday: June 2, 5-8pm
Artists’ reception: Saturday, June 3, 1-4pm
Artist talk: Saturday, June 17, 2pm
GearBox Gallery presents brush & shutter featuring paintings by Patricia Sonnino and photographs by Gina Gaiser. Searching for broader views, Sonnino and Gaiser explore environments natural and manmade for hidden structural threads in submerged grids of oyster farms, labyrinthian patterns of branching trees, or implied geometries of mundane urban environments and elevated roadways. Gaiser photographs Oakland on a daily basis, isolating moments of visual significance in the forgotten and ordinary, sometimes following a captured image into a rhyming sequence or pattern. Sonnino maps estuaries and woods looking for underlying patterns and forms in the flicker of constant movement and change
About Patricia Sonnino
Patricia Sonnino is a visual artist in San Francisco. Her current work maps estuaries and woods looking for underlying patterns in the flicker of constant flux. Sonnino uses shape and color to mark an open-ended moment, patterns or geometric repetition sometimes intervening to remind that all is not what it seems. Sonnino received a MA and BA in Architecture from Washington University in Saint Louis. Her exhibitions include Fort Lewis College in Durango (solo), University of North Carolina, Asheville and various group and solo exhibitions throughout the Bay Area including: the Bryant Street Gallery, GearBox Gallery, Slate Gallery, Max Occupancy Art and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art. She is represented by Karen Imperial of Bryant Street Gallery and by GearBox Gallery. Sonnino has taught design at the Boston Architectural Center and was a visiting artist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. and at Fort Lewis College, CO. Her residency awards include the Ucross Foundation, Willapa Bay AIR, Vermont Studio Center, and Penland.
About Gina Gaiser
Gina Gaiser is an Oakland-based artist working primarily in photography and digital media. In grade school, she took a summer course on photography and made her own pinhole camera. Soon after she started collecting old format cameras in various states of repair. Not afraid to take things apart, she deconstructed the cameras, made adjustments, and loaded them with film to see what images she could make. In her work, Gaiser is most comfortable creating through experimentation. She sees technology as a collaborator and plays with techniques and processes until she gets the desired result. She received her BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz and studied printmaking and art history for one year at Il Bisonte School of Graphic Arts in Florence, Italy. Gaiser returned to the Bay Area and co-founded the artist collective Ben Dunne Presents producing pop-up art events. She received an MFA from Mills College in Digital Media, Video and Sculpture and is currently an artist at GearBox Gallery in Oakland.