SURFACE TENSION
Photographs
AXIS Gallery, 625 S St. Sacramento
July 3rd - August 2nd, 2026
Gallery Hours 12-5pm
Second Saturday Reception
July 11th - 5-8pm.
ABOUT THE WORK:
Roma Devanbu has been making and exhibiting her paintings and mix-media work for decades. In Surface Tension, her first exhibit exclusively of photographs, we see her hungry painters eye hunting and gathering brush marks, patterns and textures in the world around her.
“Inside the studio I manipulate materials. I rub, tear, fold, cut, glue and paint to create images on paper and canvas. When I leave the studio my creative actions gain a broader context and I understand my gestures as echoes of larger elemental forces acting on natural and man-made surfaces.”
The photographs in this exhibition are records of a physical world in which materials collide, collaborate, stretch, erode, rust, scratch, drape, freeze and embrace.
The subjects are approached in an unapologetically straight forward manner, presenting the plain facts within the scope of her viewfinder. But each title includes a date and time, down to the second, reminding us that the unique set of circumstances is temporary and will be disrupted by the influence of reorganization and/or entropy.
DEDICATION:
The exhibition is dedicated to the memory of the gallerist and photo historian Alan Klotz and the photographer Phil Perkis. Devanbu met and studied with Klotz and Perkis while earning her MFA in painting from Pratt Institute in the mid 1980’s.
Below is a selection of images from the exhibition. Click on any images for more information.
