EVENTS
Unsuspected
Curated by: Cecilia Fajardo-Hill
Participating artists: Julie Anand, Sybil Brintrup, Stan Buglass, Amalia Caputo, Liz Cohen, Lenora de Barros, Cameron Gainer, Mehrdad Mirzaie, Elizabeth Pineda, Patricia Sannit, and Liza Stout
Dates: October 17 – November 8, 2025
Location: Northlight Gallery, 605 E Grant Street Studio Phoenix 85003
Programming and events on October 17:
- Karima Walker, Seams, 2025, 6:30 pm.
Seams explores the physical and sonic potentials of voice and sample transmissions, the peripheries where one thing becomes another, of focal and global attention.
- Curators Ask the Artists, 6:45 pm.
- Patricia Sannit, Angle of Repose, 2025 , 7:15 pm.
What’s the difference between rock and flesh? Geologist Marcia Bjornerud writes that rocks are a document of life on earth, and our bodies are a document of life on earth. We are both made of the same elements. We live in time. Gravity pulls us, closer in, and down.
- Liza Stout, Liza Stout, Two Person Broom, Performers: Liza Stout and Ian Solaski, 2025, 7:30 pm.
Liza Stout’s performative practice reimagines domestic objects and tools through eccentric and subversive designs. Her sculptural forms activate the relationship between body and object, revealing how caregiving tools, often devalued in domestic and professional spaces, act as agents of resilience and transformation. Through performative gestures, domestic objects such as brooms, brushes, cooking, and cleaning tools, shift from their functional roles into instruments of empowerment and defense. As hybrid accessories, these forms entangle with the body, to propose an imaginative rethinking of cleaning and repurposing to emphasize our capacity to redefine notions of “value.” In live performance, as well as through photography and video documentation, Stout highlights how these objects interact with the body to engage broader social structures. Through honoring domestic tasks and embodying modes of defense, her work explores resilience, transformation, and the shifting boundaries between care and protection.
About the Exhibition:
Unsuspected is a collective exhibition that proposes to focus on the overlooked, the insignificant, and the forgotten. Photography has a unique capacity to capture something unseen, through either a long or premeditated creative process, experimentation, chance occurrences, as documentation of performative acts, as a transdisciplinary art form, a screen shot, etc. When a photographic image exists with intention -conceptual, intuitive, political, humoristic, critical, etc.- within and beyond the medium-itself-, it may reveal a visual and conceptual universe that far from confirming reality as we know it, it may expand it, question it, and reinvent it, in unexpected ways. Paradoxically, the more insignificant, overlooked or recognizable the subject, the experiential disturbance is the more potent.
This exhibition is inspired by artist Sybil Brintrup (Chile 1954-2020) a Chilean conceptual artist who worked in diverse media -video, performance, photography, poetry, objects, games- who was often overlooked. Unsuspected is about our relationship with objects and the world that surrounds and embraces us; it is about artists paying attention to what seems irrelevant or inconsequential. An intergenerational group of artists -ASU professors, alumni, and nonaffiliated guest artists- offer images that reveal seeing with imagination and intent, within and beyond the known and the photographic medium.
Hospital aesthetics
Disability, medicine, activism
by Amanda Cachia
Book launch & lecture with
Amanda Cachia
Oct 16 | 6 p.m. | Grant Street Studios & Zoom
Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism argues that contemporary disabled artists are offering a new hospital aesthetics, where health and care are being taken into their own hands and body-minds. Hospital aesthetics is defined as artwork that explores the ever-subjective experience of illness, set apart from and outside of a clinical or therapeutic setting, and in opposition to the medical model of disability. The author examines the work of nine contemporary disabled artists and four care collectives from the United States, Canada and Europe across five chapters, utilizing a range of mediums, including drawing, sculpture, installation, painting, performance, video and socially engaged art practice, to illustrate “hospital aesthetics.”
Of Light and Alchemy
Guest Curator: Liz Allen
Participated Artist: Participated Artists: Brenda Biondo, Meg Gould, Joshua Mokry, David Shannon-Lier, Ariel Wilson
Artist Talk: Brenda Biondo, September 05,2025, 6:30 p.m.
Artist Talk: Joshua Mokry, September 19,2025, 6:30 p.m.
Closing Reception and Artist Talks, (Ariel Wilson and Meg Gould), October 03,2025, 6:30 p.m.
“I am burning with desire to see your experiments from nature.” – Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre
Nascent photographic technology was a delicate dance with light and chemistry fueled by curiosity and experimentation. In 1839 two processes were announced, first in France and later in England with great fanfare. However, Louis Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot were not the only ones toiling in their labs “burning with desire” as Daguerre described his excitement in a letter to his collaborator Nicéphore Niépce in 1828. Many others endeavored with various processes to capture the potential of an image created by light bouncing off a subject onto a flat surface. Some motivated by commerce, others by science, and still others by beauty, they could not have known how photography would transform the world by advancing the dissemination of information, shaping our relationship to representation, and thus influencing culture and history.
In the exhibition, Of Light and Alchemy, the desire still burns in these artists as they continue the rich and multi-faceted tradition of experimentation and discovery that was marked by those announcements nearly 200 years ago. Through various iterations of photo-sensitive materials, the artists delve into the human relationship to time, perception and metaphor in collaboration with light and nature to further expand the boundaries of experience.
long violence dreamt me west
Exhibition by Li Rothrock
Reclaiming Red
Reception | Feb 7 | 6 to 8 p.m.
Colors hold symbolism and meanings already established by Western societies. However, for Native and Indigenous people, the symbolisms are diverse and hold different meanings. The color red carries great significance for Indigenous and Native communities. It is a sacred color used to describe our origin stories, sacred land and blessings of fire for warmth, cooking and protection. Reclaiming Red explores the colonial implications of the color redand demonstrates how Indigenous people use it for healing, peace, sacredness, unity and Hózhó (a Diné Bizaad word for balance and harmony).
Participating artists: Tedra Begay (Diné), Jaida Grey Eagle (Oglala Lakota), Tailyr Irvine (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), Eugene Tapahe (Diné) and Maya Tinhitiyas Attean, (Wabanaki, Penobscot Nation).
Curated by Erin Tapahe (Diné).
Image: Jaida Grey Eagle, “Always”, 2022.
January 19 – February 03, 2024
Opening Reception and Artist Talk:
Land, Body & Archive, an exhibition by Southwest Photo Collaborative
An exhibition by current MFA students from the University of New Mexico, Arizona State University, and University of Arizona.
This exhibition speaks to the practices of thirteen artists in the midst of excavating and alchemizing their visions alongside one another.
Participating Artists:
Jacqueline Arias
Nathan Cordova
Zoë Gleitsman
claudia hermano
Mehrdad Mirzaie
Richard Pence
Elizabeth Piñeda
Emma Ressel
Francis Reynolds
li Rothrock
Anna Rotty
Brianna Tadeo
Nicholas Valdés
November 17 2023, 6 PM.
Opening Reception: Meaning Making Machines
Artists:
Everett Milloy
Camille Misty
Justin Lavilla
Alex Roos
Sam Wynne
Andrew Finch
Karen Wieboldt
Cooper Brown
Jason White
Mackenzie Bernett
September 15 2023, 6 PM.
OPENING RECEPTION & ARTIST TALK RAPHEAL BEGAY
Seral Bodies is curated by Roshii Montaño and Ninabah Reid Winton. The exhibition examines the contemporary practice of Indigenous photographers and artists: Rapheal Begay (Diné), Nate Lemuel (Diné), Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw) and River Whittle (Caddo/Lenape).
In critical response to extractive practices represented within 20th century photography, the artists in Seral Bodies challenge historic narratives and static impressions of Indigenous bodies and sites through their dynamic practices, which re-insert living Indigenous bodies and languages on Indigenous lands.