Gearbox Gallery
Contemporary Art
(un)planned landscapes
Gina Gaiser & Sarah Newton
May 5 – June 4
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 7, 1-4 pm
Artist Talk: Saturday, May 21, 2 pm
First Fridays, May 6 & June 3, 5-8 pm
Gina Gaiser
Sarah Newton
GearBox Gallery is pleased to present (un)planned landscapes, an art exhibition featuring work by artists Gina Gaiser and Sarah Newton who both 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
Gina Gaiser is an Oakland, California-based artist working primarily in photography and digital media. In high school, she was the first female student to work in the print shop duplicating printed school district forms. This is where she found her love of print processes, paper, and the smell of ink.
She received a BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and earned a certificate in Printmaking and Art History from Il Bisonte School of Graphic Arts in Florence, Italy. Upon her return to the Bay Area, she co-founded the artist collective Ben Dunne Presents producing pop-up art events, and later received an MFA from Mills College in Digital Media, Video, and Sculpture.
After graduation, Gina taught art classes to people of all ages from kindergarten to college level. She was awarded residencies at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA, Southern Exposure in San Francisco and Top Hat Shine in Vienna, Austria. Since 2002, she has worked at the University of California supporting teaching and learning with technology.
Gina’s photographs have been selected to be in numerous competitive group shows juried by Curators from the MoMA NYC, Oakland Museum of CA, and the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. She is a Member Artist at the Gearbox Gallery Contemporary Art in Oakland.
Sarah Newton is a San Francisco artist who works primarily on paper in a variety of media including drawing, etching, and woodblock printing. In her work, Sarah often focuses on spaces and details of the everyday built environment that generally exist at the periphery of attention. Her drawings have been included in New American Paintings, and also in solo and group exhibitions in the Bay Area, London, and Yokohama, with recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Cañada College in Redwood City, and Inclusions Gallery, San Francisco. Sarah has been a featured artist for the San Francisco Center for the Book’s Roadworks printmaking event, was invited to create an artist’s book, That’s It, Liquor Beer Wine, published by the SFCB’s Imprint Publications, and in 2014 and 2016 was awarded fellowship residencies at Playa artists’ residency program in Oregon. She has a degree in printmaking from the California College of the Arts.
“I have been drawing the landscapes I find at these endpoints where the trail hits the zones of construction, industry and restricted areas which prevent the trail sections from being connected.
Visiting the broken lines on the map takes me to places outside of public use, unimproved lands that still contain the remnants of the maritime and military past of the shoreline, areas of infrastructure and industry that are overlooked. The landscape is transitional, not only due to the Bay Area’s appetite for improvable land but also as a result of gradual land subsidence and rising sea level. The fragile changing edge of the ocean is also the shifting margin where people will see the drastic effects of our hand on the environment.”
