TINT Gallery is pleased to announce “Grounded,” a group show featuring works by Catherine Mackey, Sarah Newton, and Deborah Sibony.
Three Bay Area women artists, working in three different media (drawing, printmaking, and painting), explore what it feels like to be grounded here. Inspired by the Bay’s transitioning landscapes, the collapse and rebuilding of industry, and the areas between the water and developed land, these artists capture a snapshot of the imprint of and disappearance of the urban on nature. By finding the beauty in architectural decrepitude, destruction, construction, and incompleteness, Mackey, Newton, and Sibony find a way to stay grounded in the Bay Area during these uncertain times.
Catherine Mackey’s focus is on buildings shaped by the necessity of manufacture, industry, and agriculture. She explores the demise and abandonment of structures no longer suited for today’s industries, and she searches for the accidental “moments” of beauty caused by their neglect and decay. At a surface level, these moments include the rust on an old sea-wall, the decay of wooden pier structures, and faded signage advertising products and businesses of the past. On a deeper level, these moments include the structural reveal which happens during the demolition process, or during the slow collapse of buildings as seen in her recent work with agricultural barns.
Sarah Newton’s drawings are an exploration of the proposed Bay Trail, a project begun in 1989, that follows the shoreline of the Bay Area. This planned 500-mile path currently exists in discontinuous pieces. Following the map of the trail, Newton draws its incomplete segments. She focuses on the endpoints where the trail hits the zones of construction, industry, and restricted areas which prevent the trail sections from being connected. 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 humanity’s hand on the environment.
Deborah Sibony’s work similarly delves into the relationship between architectural construction/ destruction and nature. She is interested in how our landscapes reveal history and sense of place, and how they affect the human condition: from industrial sites which are abandoned and are in the process of being dismantled to transitional landscapes which are in flux between deconstruction and construction — disappearing as quickly as they appear. In Sibony’s work, patterns gather and disperse — rhythms that form an imprint which is primordial in its impulse.
Three Bay Area women artists, working in three different media (drawing, printmaking, and painting), explore what it feels like to be grounded here. Inspired by the Bay’s transitioning landscapes, the collapse and rebuilding of industry, and the areas between the water and developed land, these artists capture a snapshot of the imprint of and disappearance of the urban on nature. By finding the beauty in architectural decrepitude, destruction, construction, and incompleteness, Mackey, Newton, and Sibony find a way to stay grounded in the Bay Area during these uncertain times.
Catherine Mackey’s focus is on buildings shaped by the necessity of manufacture, industry, and agriculture. She explores the demise and abandonment of structures no longer suited for today’s industries, and she searches for the accidental “moments” of beauty caused by their neglect and decay. At a surface level, these moments include the rust on an old sea-wall, the decay of wooden pier structures, and faded signage advertising products and businesses of the past. On a deeper level, these moments include the structural reveal which happens during the demolition process, or during the slow collapse of buildings as seen in her recent work with agricultural barns.
Sarah Newton’s drawings are an exploration of the proposed Bay Trail, a project begun in 1989, that follows the shoreline of the Bay Area. This planned 500-mile path currently exists in discontinuous pieces. Following the map of the trail, Newton draws its incomplete segments. She focuses on the endpoints where the trail hits the zones of construction, industry, and restricted areas which prevent the trail sections from being connected. 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 humanity’s hand on the environment.
Deborah Sibony’s work similarly delves into the relationship between architectural construction/ destruction and nature. She is interested in how our landscapes reveal history and sense of place, and how they affect the human condition: from industrial sites which are abandoned and are in the process of being dismantled to transitional landscapes which are in flux between deconstruction and construction — disappearing as quickly as they appear. In Sibony’s work, patterns gather and disperse — rhythms that form an imprint which is primordial in its impulse.
Deborah Sibony came to the United States at age seventeen and has lived in the Bay Area for the past 35 years.
While working full time as a CD package designer, Sibony took a printmaking class and fell in love with the process. Sibony found work as a master printer/workshop instructor at Aurobora Press in San Francisco where she worked with many notable artists for seven years. She currently teaches and mentors artists in her printmaking studio in Berkeley.
Printmaking, and monotypes in particular, continue to be Sibony’s passion. The process inspires experimentation and has a spontaneous nature that appeals to her. She takes photographs, which she uses as a starting point for an idea. Combined with the monotype, she uses a variety of mark-making methods, photo transfers, ink, drawing, staining, and painting, each assimilating a progression of ideas. Color, line, and form take shape, and the landscape is transformed, weathered and distilled, transporting the viewer to a place that is familiar, yet unknown, reflective and engaging.
Sibony’s work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums including the Turner Print Museum, Bankside Gallery in London, and Marin Museum of Contemporary Art. Sibony’s work can also be found in private and public collections including John Muir Hospital, Kaiser Permanente, San Francisco Hilton, Sarasota Ritz Carlton, Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library, Yale University, University of California Berkeley, Bancroft Library, among others.