Waterways by their nature may be free-flowing, immersive, gentle, or striking. They inevitably find their way through several ecosystems, or rather assume the ecosystem itself as an entity of many parts that which constitute a greater whole. The contour and vessel of a river, for example, traverses often times great stretches of land, whose frontiers have been pushed and carved forward through the culmination of thousands or millions of years — here it is the raging cascade so much as it is the covert stream, capable of regrouping or regenerating this geographical schema at any point until it finds its way back into the ocean. This all-encompassing, multiple quality is similar in energy to the artist in their own right. Riverbank professes that we are the process and the content, the work and its elements, the location and destination at once in our accumulation of meaning and desire. This adjunct exhibit invites the viewer to reflect on how the waterways of life spur creation and connote progress within that visual expression. How does one trace back the internal from the external? What do we find, standing on the land alongside the artist, gathered beside the margins of our container? Shelter, passage, arrival, attachment. There are treasures to be found everywhere in the delineations of our character. - Gavin Piedra

Gavin Piedra is a painter and multidisciplinary artist currently residing in Richmond, CA. They are a Ryman Arts alumni currently studying Art History and Studio Arts at Berkeley City College, who volunteers at Richmond Art Center and interns at Personal Space in their time outside school. Their works express ties to the gendered body in a continued attempt to clarify a personal position, alongside their visual experimentation in dry, wet, and digital media.