Adding Stones to Rise
@axisgallery
May1-May 30
Reception May 9, 5-8pm
This exhibition grows out of an ongoing curatorial inquiry into how natural systemsâerosion, accumulation, and renewalâmirror personal and collective experience.
The title emerged from a focus on nature, the creative process, and collaboration with the artistsâtheir works and words. Rivers appear as metaphors for release, endurance, and becoming. In these reflections, water is not only a physical force but an ancestral oneâa site of cleansing, protection, and return. Stones, weight, and resistance are reframed here: not as obstacles, but as agents of change, capable of altering direction, causing water to rise, reshaping what follows. What weighs us down can also be what makes movement possible.
Adding Stones to Rise brings together Sacramento-based artists working across multiple media, their practices rooted in earth, migration, plants, weather, and water. Like a riverâwhere each point is distinct yet inseparable from the wholeâthe works reflect ideas of connection, difference, and expansiveness, understanding identity, and particularly Blackness, as fluid, relational, and non-monolithic. Across the exhibition, processes of weathering and renewal unfold: water and erosion, release and persistence moving as parallel forcesâcreative and destructive, intimate and expansiveâsuggesting that survival is cyclical, and healing accumulative.
Adding Stones to Rise centers the work of Black women and nonbinary artists. The exhibition offers a collective meditation on movement, care, resistance, and transformationâan invitation to consider how we protect our energy, construct places of refuge, and find ways to rise through what we carry.
A catalog accompanying the exhibition will be available for purchase, extending these conversations beyond the gallery.
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@artsy.amarii @tasha_nichole_art @tashathrowsraw @amariginal_art_ @sabrinaclarkart @laurelingilmoreartist @wmbois @alexwithscissors @khaaliaaaaa @pittman8530 @baileyjazzers 
