WHERE ART INSPIRES CONNECTION
Grounded
featuring work by
Catherine Mackey
Sarah Newton
Deborah Sibony
August 18, 2022 - October 2, 2022
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 (painting, drawing, and printmaking), 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 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. 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.