Gearbox Gallery

Lani Asher

My paper-based collages are constructed with photographs, painting, and drawings, joined together on the reverse side with rice paper and glue. I build up the delicate surfaces with layers of paint, pencil and paper, giving the collages a tactile and sculptural dimension. My ongoing series of drawings echo the shapes, colors, textures, empty spaces, linear qualities,and the narratives found in my collages.

Jules Campbell

Born and raised in Pembrokeshire, South Wales, Jules A. Campbell started her creative career as a graduate of The New College of Speech & Drama, London, UK in 1974 (now an affiliate of Middlesex University). Early on she taught English and established the Drama Department at Southaw Girls’ School in North London, UK.

Campbell moved to the States in the early 80’s and eventually turned her attention to the visual arts, studying at DVC where she took classes in painting, drawing, printmaking (monotype, etching, woodcut, screen printing), figure drawing/painting, watercolour, sculpture and metal arts. Throughout the last decade, she has been involved with both visual and performing arts organizations and has participated in many, many exhibitions and events. In 2015 Campbell became a founding member of GearBox Gallery in Oakland where she currently maintains a studio exploring the beauty and grit of the urban environments she embraces as an inspiration.

Harry Clewans

Harry Clewans is largely self-taught and has had his studio in Oakland since 1983.  He has exhibited extensively in California, nationally and abroad. He has been awarded the James Phalen Award for printmaking and a fellowship at the Kala Institute of Art. His art consists of unique large-scale woodblock prints made by a system of assembling hundreds of prints together to form the larger image. His artwork is in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the Mills College Art Collection and the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life (Judah L. Magnes Museum).

Linda Ellinwood

“Walking through a landscape, I am constantly attracted to the remains of the germination process found on the ground: seed pods, leaves, branches. Over years I have collected and stored them in an antique seed cabinet. Taking cues from the materials themselves, I combine them in such a way that you might question if they occurred naturally or were finessed. The process is organic, elements connect with each other and become distinct in their own right, intrinsically intimate, beautiful, haunting, humorous. I hope these pieces kindle an appreciation for the exquisite natural objects that surround us.”

Christine Ferrouge

Christine Ferrouge creates narrative paintings of childhood where character and identity are forming quietly beneath the surface. The models for her subjects are often girls. The paintings are a glimpse into the serious work of imaginative play where the children practice adapting to their social culture or physical environment. Ferrouge’s paintings are larger than life and her subjects are dignified, confident, and thoughtful. This documentation of girlhood is both contemporary and timeless.

Ferrouge grew up in Minnesota and fell in love with painting at a young age. Her education includes a BFA in painting from the University of Evansville, Indiana; and studying in Florence, Amsterdam, and the Dominican Republic. Her recent honors include the de Young Museum Open and solo show Picnic at Gray Loft Gallery. Ferrouge is an award-winning educator and taught art in urban Chicago and Los Angeles. She is a member of Gearbox Gallery in Oakland and exhibits weekly at the Werkshack during Saturday Stroll on 25th Street. Ferrouge curates for the Gallery at the Werkshack and serves on Oakland Art Murmur’s venue committee.

Gina Gaiser

Gina Gaiser is an Oakland-based artist and Bay Area native working primarily in photography and digital media. In high school, she was the first female student to work in the print shop duplicating school district forms. This is where she found her love of print processes, paper, and the smell of ink.

Her photographs document moments in everyday life that may be familiar but are often not noticed or remembered. In this human age, the Anthropocene, we recognize humanity’s impact on the planet. It is in this context that Gina explores how we navigate through our environment, build structures, and connect with others.

Gina received a BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, a Certificate in Printmaking and Art History from Il Bisonte School of Graphic Arts in Florence, Italy, and an MFA in Digital Media, Video, and Sculpture from Mills College in Oakland, California.

Sonia Gill

“The confluence of dreams and reality has occupied my art practice for the past several years. Photographing my personal collection of dish ware I search for compositions that create a specific moment, a birth of a new reality. Using collage, oil paint or watercolor I translate these dreams into paintings. Shapes, angles, light and dark are all in the right places and allow easy access but the colors and patterns I create deviate from the known and invite viewers to take a new view of something familiar.

Like dreams that combine outrageous and normal situations yet tap deep and real emotions, I am creating art that can transport viewers into a “realer” reality. I think of this as a road that leads to new thoughts and ideas; it can be a way to think, feel and live differently. My exaggerations can help to unveil personal emotional truths that are otherwise difficult to access. Besides these psychological investigations, I also offer the option for the work to be seen as beautiful compositions of cups and bowls filled with exciting colors and patterns and interesting reflections and distortions. Viewers can find what they need.”

Artist Sonia Gill lives in Berkeley and Yorkville (Mendocino County) with her husband, son and Yellow Lab. Originally from Milwaukee, Gill attended the University of Wisconsin/Madison and Michigan State University. After a decade of teaching French, she moved to California and attended the California College of The Arts in Oakland graduating with a degree in Painting.

Rachel Major

Rachel Major is a visual artist and art educator based in San Francisco, CA. Rachel uses a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture, fabric, collage and photography to explore our complex and often fraught relationship and connection with food. She uses images from 17th century Dutch Still Lives for inspiration as well as exploring purely abstract forms to explore ideas of beauty, power and control.

Originally from Toronto, Canada, she is a graduate of the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Canada (OCAD), has a BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art (NSCAD) in Halifax, Nova Scotia as well an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, CA. She has exhibited in Canada, France and the U.S. 

TaVee McAllister Lee

TaVee McAllister Lee works in the arena of installation, combining various paper elements into intimate collages of a free nature. Relying on “consumer” papers. i.e. those that are readily available to almost everyone in our culture, like magazines, gift-wrap, and wallpapers, she constructs poetic, non-linear commentary focusing on themes of vulnerability, loss, connection and the relationship between current consumerist demand and a future vision of the ecological consequences.

Born in South Dakota, TaVee McAllister Lee grew up mostly in Oklahoma, after a stint in Laos as a little girl. She attended Oklahoma State University as an architectural engineering student and went on to study at the Kansas City Art Institute, earning a BFA in Painting and Printmaking there. Eventually, she moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and now maintains an East Bay studio in Martinez. Over the years she’s been the curator, director or coordinator for many, many exhibitions, as well as a founding member of GearBox Gallery, with a long exhibition record of her own.

Patricia Sonnino

Patricia Sonnino takes a contemporary approach to abstraction. Various spaces with individual artistic languages inhabit her colorful layered works on wood panels. Hard edges meet and zoom off into soft ones, shallow spaces swerve into deep, and opaque colors collide with the luminous. The juxtapositions of these arrangements of diverse, self-contained spaces resemble a “still life” in flight.

Sonnino is living and working in San Francisco. She holds a MA and BA in Architecture from Washington University in Saint Louis. Sonnino has taught design at the Boston Architectural Center and has been a visiting artist at Fort Lewis College in Colorado and the University of Birmingham in the U.K. She has been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson Vermont, the Willapa Bay AIR, Oysterville Washington, Playa, Summer Lake, Oregon, and Penland in the Blue Ridge Mountains, North Carolina.

Sonnino exhibits nationally in solo group exhibitions including with Gearbox Gallery in Oakland California, Slate Gallery in Tahoe, at Max Occupancy Art Projects located at the Mystic Hotel in San Francisco, at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, at the University of North Carolina in Asheville, North Carolina, and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art in Novato, California.

Jamie Treacy

Jamie Treacy is an Oakland, California-based visual artist, masters swimmer and art educator. He received his BFA at the University of Michigan and his MFA from CCA (both degrees in painting and drawing).  He also holds a Single Subject Visual Art credential and a Career Technical Education credential in Arts, Media and Entertainment.

Jamie’s artwork is imbued with themes of eco-justice, speculative fiction and exo-biology. He creates bodies of work in painting, drawing and mixed media that draw imagery from underwater worlds, the forest and his internal landscape.

His philosophy as an art educator is that all youth deserve access to a high-quality arts education, and that creative inquiry is fundamental to solving the most pressing problems of our future.

Jamie is the recipient of the William H. Lewis Watercolor award and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation fellowship. Jamie’s work has been exhibited in the California Bay Area, Canada, Mexico and Japan.  He currently serves as the Director of the Visual and Performing Arts Pathway at Skyline High School in Oakland.

Diane Williams

Diane Williams is a master painter who uses intuitive color, bold brushwork and monumental scale as a vehicle for the voice of the strong feminine to weave nature’s story across time.

Multiple layers chronicle what is concrete and what is elusive; erasures remind us that nothing is permanent, yet everything leaves an impression. The calm, vast space of the canvas allows a story to be told through generations.

​Her paintings invite the viewer to enter uncharted territory; a world where women and elders are revered as holders of our collective intuitive lineage and where listening to one’s intuition is the highest form of prayer.

Diane states, “My creative process is a dance between chance, conscious decision and risk. I make a mark then respond to the mark, never certain where the process will lead. I begin with an intention which is what guides my process”.

Diane’s color palette is inspired by living in Jamaica and Costa Rica. Her love of mark-making comes from studying calligraphy in China. What sets her apart from other artists is more than 40 years of experience coupled with a deep belief in art’s ability to heal. In this troubling time of Corona Virus, her online courses are reaching students far and near, helping them cope with fear and social isolation.

Sandra Wong Orloff

Sandra Wong Orloff creates graphite and ink drawings of people set in abstract watercolor environments. Her subjects are inspired by photos, taken by or shared with her, found on-line and in publications. Sandra is interested in how we present ourselves. The abstract lines evolved out of play, and exploration of the push and pull that develops between the figures and the abstracted backgrounds. The lines represent many things, colorful landscapes, the weight of the times and world, the energy of the body and the universe, the unknowable aspect of the future.

Sandra earned a BFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and a MFA in Fine Arts from Mills College. She was included in the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts first Bay Area Now and awarded an Artist-In-Residence Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. She was a founding member with Gina Gaiser of the artists collective Ben Dunne Presents, producing pop-up art exhibitions and events. She has taught artmaking to young people, exhibited her artwork here and there and continues to explore her creative process in Oakland, CA.