Sarah M. Newton: Interruptions in the Bay Trail

Join us for the opening reception with the artist — Thursday, September 10, 5–7pm.

Sarah Newton explores the margins where the San Francisco Bay and human occupation collide. Her practice begins with the 350-mile Bay Trail-or more accurately, a series of paths-that ring the San Francisco and San Pablo Bays. The project to build a continuous, public, shoreline path started in 1987 and is, as yet, incomplete.

Newton takes public transportation to various sections of the trail, then hikes to the places where it ends abruptly or peters out... often in parking lots, embankments, or subdivisions. Rather than render a picturesque view of a magnificent landscape, Newton focuses on the spot where the natural and human-made meet.

Exquisitely executed on either grey or brown paper, the drawings' historicism refers to nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographers of the American West, the Hudson River School, and those art movements' political analogue-Manifest Destiny. Just a few years ago, the notion that the resources of the West are unlimited and ours for the taking seemed unarguably dead. But a new presidential administration with its "American Expansionism" and aggressive extractive policies makes the examination of our relationship to our environment more timely than ever.

This is Sarah Newton's first solo exhibition at Hosfelt Gallery.