Northlight Gallery is inviting submissions of photographs for an event on the widespread unofficial role of photography in our daily lives. Pictures shape our personal image, collective memory and identity, the fleeting nature of the everyday, the intimacy of our homes and friendships, and stand as testimony of the charged events in today’s society. We are seeking the submission of candid, immediate, direct, spontaneous, snapshot aesthetic photography, not formal photographs. These will be grouped and screened in wall projections and TV screens, or you may bring handouts, or pin them informally to the walls. This event proposes for us to come together as a community for a social event to share the images that shape our present.
Open to BFA, BA, MFA, MA Students, Faculty and Alumni
Important Dates:
Deadline: March 15
Event date: Friday April 3
Submission Guidelines
Submit short statement: 150-200 words stating why you would like to participate in this event, and the role of photography in your daily life.
Submit 1 to 3 images, 300 dpi or a short video of 3 minutes max.
Opening Reception: January 16, 2026 , 6-9 pm
In 2023-24, artist Julie Anand and writer Sally Ball were awarded an IHR Seed Grant in support of their own visio-textual collaboration. Their work together led them to increasingly integrated team-taught courses, including the workshop-style class held in Fall 2025, “Collaboration: Visual Art & Creative Writing.”
At the beginning of the semester, visual artists and writers were placed in collaborative groups determined by their unique interests and insights. Over the course of several months, our writers and artists worked alongside one another to develop work from their collective imagination. Some wrote and created as though through echolocation, a call and response to one another’s work, while some composed in tandem, crossing the boundaries of their genre.
Through Lines: Reciprocity in Text & Image brings together new collaborative works by graduate students in Arizona State University’s Creative Writing and Visual Arts MFA programs. Moving across poetry, prose, photography, printmaking, installation, and hybrid forms, this exhibition explores how text and image can listen to, lean on, and transform one another. This show is not defined by any thematic element connecting each of its pieces, but rather the possibility that lies in human-to-human connection.
Each piece in this exhibition is the result of compromise, conversation, and reciprocity—the imperfect and messy reality of creating alongside others: retellings of mythologies and archetypes that reveal the human condition; contemplations on survival after loss; the reenactment of shame; even a high-stakes card game. Through Lines offers a new invitation to the page, the canvas, the screen, the plinth—and a tender practice of caretaking across time and space. These are the products of what it means to be co-creators, working alongside one another in community.
Participated Artists
Shipra Agarwal, Julie Anand, Sally Ball, Marina Basu, Adia Robinson Butler, Chris Du, Katie Grierson, Jace Hermanto, Celina Hernandez, Dawn Kushner, Isabel Lanzetta, Argent Martinez Brito, Oscar Montes,Maura O’Dea, Hannah Palmisano, Lily Regalia
Brennie Shoup, Lauren Stevens, Annie Stutzman, Heather Weller, Max Wheeler, Zêdan Xelef
Please join artist and ASU Professor Julie Anand for a public program connected with the exhibition “Unsuspected” curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill at Northlight Gallery on November 7th, 2025 at 5:30-6:30pm. We will meet at the gallery and leave together, venturing on foot for several city blocks to gather the artifacts we find along the street. Later, we return to Grant Street Studios to compose with the objects we’ve collected, interpreting what we might learn from them about our immediate and perhaps overlooked environments.
Northlight 605 E Grant Street Studio
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:
Seams explores the physical and sonic potentials of voice and sample transmissions, the peripheries where one thing becomes another, of focal and global attention.
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’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.
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.”
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.
Exhibition by Li Rothrock
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.
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
Everett Milloy
Camille Misty
Justin Lavilla
Alex Roos
Sam Wynne
Andrew Finch
Karen Wieboldt
Cooper Brown
Jason White
Mackenzie Bernett
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.