Gearbox Gallery
Contemporary Art
ALL YOU IS BRIMMING
Michele Foyer and Patricia Sonnino
March 31 - April 30, 2022
Artists' Reception Saturday, April 2, 1 to 4 pm
GearBox Gallery is pleased to present All You Is Brimming, an art exhibition featuring work by artists Michele Foyer and Patricia Sonnino.
When the world became more still, Foyer and Sonnino paradoxically delved into work that explores multitudes of variations which brim over boundaries. Both artists work without plan, adding one element to another to create an aggregate. The exhibition title, All You is Brimming, evokes the bubbling up which occurs before codification into systems and language.
Sonnino’s large-scale graphic drawings cluster red-hued shapes into dense crowds that often press against the edge of the paper. The positioning on the almost-square white page creates a surface tension between figure and ground. The shapes appear to escape the paper, as if transformed into Sonnino’s actual hand-sized felt sculptures displayed in groupings in the gallery. For Sonnino, red summons “heartbeat, anxiety, loss and love. The last alchemical stage. What I see when I close my eyes.”
Foyer tapes, cuts, paints and gathers various pieces of paper in no set sequence to make her hybrid sculptural paintings. Her idiosyncratic collagist approach departs from notions of pre-existing form and enables the individual and the whole to both maintain a strong presence. For Foyer, “Colors flirt and go for walks. They are oscillating frequencies. Invisible but palpable. Never static.” Each work floats two inches from the wall, allowing the painted back side to reflect a traveling chromatic glow. The colored light forms an immaterial “ground” for the entire piece and fluctuates in different light conditions.
About the Artists
Michele Foyer
Michele Foyer is a visual artist whose thoughtful abstractions address the movement intrinsic to color and its qualities of relation, resonance and rhyme. Her sculptural paintings of paper explore how we see and know. She is intrigued by how objects, people and thoughts gather disparate times, places and modes of ordering experience in an often-tenuous aggregate.
Foyer holds an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BA from UC Berkeley, honors + departmental honors. She has exhibited throughout the United States and the Bay Area where she lives and works. Her art is included in the White Columns Artist Registry, NY, curated by Matthew Higgs. Recently, she mounted a solo exhibition at Fourth Wall Gallery in Oakland, exhibited in a four-person show at Sykes Gallery, Millersville University, PA, as well as showed in an invitational exhibition at Root Division.
Lucid Arts Foundation, Virginia Center for the Arts and Vermont Studio Center have awarded her residencies. Lucid Arts Foundation will feature her work in a forthcoming book about its residents. Art Practical, SOMArts, and SF Artful Living have covered her work. She has curated 11 exhibitions of contemporary art.
Patricia Sonnino is a visual artist based in San Francisco who uses shape and color to mark moments in a world of constant movement and change. She maps the threshold between thoughts and words drawn from memories, feelings and images.
Sonnino received an MA and BA in Architecture from Washington University in Saint Louis, MO. Selected exhibitions include Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO (solo), University of North Carolina, Asheville, NC, as well as throughout the Bay Area including at Bryant Street Gallery, GearBox Gallery, Slate Gallery, Max Occupancy Art Projects and 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 Ucross Foundation, Willapa Bay AIR, Playa, Vermont Studio Center, and Penland.
