Photography Commons^™

Community - Volume 11

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No abstract provided.

Asclepius, Lia M. Smerina

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No abstract provided.

The Geography Of Faces, Faith Abraham

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The Geography of Faces takes its title from the idea that a face, seen across decades, becomes a kind of landscape—something you learn to read not at a glance but through accumulated return visits. For Dr. Vasquez, an older physician who has seen so much, her patients' faces are the territory she has spent a lifetime learning to navigate.

The patients are chosen to represent different dimensions of that longevity. They show affection built on years of small battles, continuity across a family, autonomy that is respected. Together, these patients make the case that primary care is less about problems …

Stronger Together: Healing Through Joy, Archana Banda, Nupur S. Kumar

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Volunteering as Family Pals at Boggy Creek throughout medical school has reinforced the profound impact of communities united under a shared vision of uplifting one another. This organization cultivates a supportive camp environment for children with chronic medical conditions. One of the most meaningful aspects of these weekend adventures has been meeting children with conditions such as Type 1 Diabetes and VACTERL courageously navigating the challenges of their diagnoses while discovering new passions through activities including woodcraft, air hockey, boating, fishing, and archery.

Many times these children are excluded from normal camp experiences due to their special needs such as …

Colorblocks, Marianne Koleng

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The use of several colors to highlight the facial features in the portrait represents the various communities to which an individual belongs, including, but not limited to, their family, their school, religion, career, ethnicity, and more. Each color is used in many shapes within the face to evoke the shared importance of each community in creating identity, one is not superior to the other, and without each of them, we would not have the entire face.

The Making Of Man, Marianne Koleng

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The Making of Man is an abstract ink drawing depicting an individual's face, but at closer look, it is the intricacies that compose it. This goes to show that behind every individual, there is a community holding them together, even if it is not immediately apparent.

Side By Side, Elena L. Richardson

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This photograph captures what I came to understand as the true wealth of Mota Fofalia. In a place with few material resources, community was not just present - it was everything. These boys, arms slung around each other, smiling without hesitation, reflect a kind of belonging that doesn’t depend on circumstance. During my eight weeks there, I realized that while so much was limited, connection was abundant - and it was enough.

What She Carries, Elena L. Richardson

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This image captures the quieter side of community—the unseen labor that sustains it. Though she walks alone, everything she carries reflects a life woven into others: provision, responsibility, continuity. In rural Gujarat, I came to understand that community is not only found in togetherness, but in the everyday acts that hold it up.

A Community That Always Welcomes Me Back Like I Never Left, Bibi Chaterpateah

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No abstract provided.

Rooted In Resilience, Pranita Talukder

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This poem reflects my evolving understanding of community—not as a fixed place, but as something shaped by loss, memory, and rebuilding. It draws from my experience of displacement and the quiet search for belonging in unfamiliar spaces.

Through simple, fragmented imagery, I wanted to capture the feeling of being untethered, and the slow, intentional process of finding connection again. The poem moves between past and present, holding both absence and presence at once.

Ultimately, it is about realizing that community is not something we return to, but something we carry and create, wherever we are.

Drawing As Continuance: What Insists On Being Heard, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article extends She-Hero through an inquiry into drawing as a creation-centred practice of continuance. Five drawings are engaged as aesthetic encounters through which relational and perceptual shifts become perceptible, allowing inner authority to emerge as a cultivated capacity to remain responsive to what is unfolding. Drawing is approached as a site of metramorphic reconfiguration where imagination, memory, and embodied sensing participate in the decolonizing of perceptual habits and the restoration of relational ways of knowing.

Showing It! Art Matters. But Why? How?, Holly Edwards

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This article addresses the agency of art with reference to an exhibition entitled “The Nature of Spirit”.  That show appeared in the local public library, resonating strongly with notions of “heartwork”.  My first Artizein publication was written in response to 9/11, and this one maintains comparable urgency, seeking solace in art precisely when the world seems to be sliding into lunacy. The prose explores the powers of art in traumatizing times with words, while the images offer the reader insight and support energetically.

Text/Ures, Kathy Mantas

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

By entwining the voices of other co-creators, text and images, I share a brief site-specific photo-reverie of my life-long allure to trees—in this instance, by attending to the trees near my home. This offering is rooted in peripatetic aesthetic practices that embrace a slower creative approach and more spellbinding ways of living, learning and knowing. In essence, this is an invitation to have an artful encounter with text/ures of trees.

Attending The Way Of The Crane: Centring Our Lives Through Creative-Centred Work, Alexandra Fidyk

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

A dreamscape using pastiche is used for reflecting upon the value of creative-centred practice and research. Attending to the image through reflection and circumambulation offers entry to a centring practice. In holding both, a new image emerged. The dreamscape—an unexpected scene of cranes in joyous dance—unfolds as actual dream and offers a metaphor for understanding an arc within the dreamer’s life. In this condensed yet nuanced rumination, personal and professional, poetic and haptic, participating and witnessing blur. This practice, the way of the Crane, is timely because it introduces relational pedagogy and testimonial teaching for our times—while touching the pulse …

Mapping The Legacy Of Cinnabar Mining In California's Santa Ynez River, Lorrie Blair

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This essay is a reflection of an artist residency focused on the environmental legacy of California’s cinnabar mining. The mineral cinnabar is a primary source of mercury that was used to mine gold in California in the 1800s, and is still used globally. For this residency, I asked, “How can I creatively map the emotional and sensory landscapes of Cinnabar mining sites?” “How can art making serve to expose elements of an ecological crisis?” To answer these questions, I created cyanotypes made in and with the Santa Ynez River, which flowed through two abandoned cinnabar mines. Cyanotypes are made by …

Teaching The Eye To Slow Down: Attentive Noticing As Ecological Practice, Sara Ko

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

This visual essay unfolds through acts of careful noticing. Drawing from materials encountered through repeated walks across forested landscapes on Vancouver Island, it translates moss, soil, plant matter, and animal traces into immersive digital environments. Working through atmosphere, texture, and shifting forms rather than fixed representation, the project explores how perception is shaped by time spent with what is often overlooked. Digital processes are used not to stabilize or explain, but to hold uncertainty, fragility, and partial presence. The work invites readers to slow their looking and consider how learning, relation, and meaning can emerge through sustained attention.

Red Thread Projects For Placentary Peace, Nané Jordan

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Red Thread Projects are aesthetic expressions of my placental, eco-birthing philosophies as an artisteducator- scholar with lifelong roots reclaiming midwifery, and compassionate mother-centred birth care. Uplifting “birth” within embodied, feminist epistemologies, I aim to re-vision with the Mother, writ large and small. Since 1997, I have been creating textile artworks with red thread, activating these through performances in nature, where artwork, body, and place become interwoven texts, gifting gratitude to and with Mother Earth. My arts-centred research contributes to community education that empowers birth-givers, while advocating for the embodied, love-infused potentials of birth for human thriving.

Moving Forward: The Pulse Of Arts-Centred Research [Editorial], Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial

Artizein Editorial Team: Movements And Transitions, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Editorial overview of movements and transitions taking place with the Artizein editorial team.

About The Cover Art: Pulsing Renewal, Darlene St. Georges

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

“Pulsing Renewal,” featured on the cover of this issue, is part of River’s Invocations, a creation-centred inquiry exploring River's ecologies, relationality, and creation. The painting was chosen for its close affinity with the issue theme, The Pulse of Arts-Centred Research. The visual language of Pulsing Renewal—its movement, rhythm, and emergence—echoes the vitality, responsiveness, and ongoing renewal evident across the articles, artworks, and conversations assembled in this volume. The work is presented here as a thematic point of entry into the diverse inquiries that follow.

Full Issue_Artizein Arts And Teaching Journal, Darlene St. Georges, Barbara Bickel

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

Full Issue

Where My Memory Settles, Rachel Kobb

Masters Theses

My memory is blurry but ever present in an atmospheric state. Through my investigations of memory and sensorial experience, this thesis is an attempt to understand how the body recalls the spaces I have spent the most time: my various homes through life.

The output of this thesis is a paper installation that layers and translates spatial qualities of my past homes. The home is not a neutral container, but instead a space that should support a sense of retreat and security. Drawing upon Gaston Bachelard’s zones of experience, I explore how a domestic space is moved through distinct zones. …

Companionship, Certainty, Integrity, Chandler C. Curtis

Masters Theses

being around people who surprise me, realizing how different we all are, broadening my conception of the world and my corner of it; being kind and considerate, giving others grace; being given responsibilities; being honest with and for myself; braiding my hair collecting free things; critique discussions and any setting to diligently read objects; Culton; dancing; doing sudoku or other ‘hackable’ puzzle; doing things that seem impossible, especially for someone else; drying off with a towel that absorbs well, particularly after a cold shower; eating cantaloupe; encouraging others to trust themselves, using my experiences to support someone else's journey; exchanging …

Floaters, Kyle Gyumin Dong

Masters Theses

The eye is often regarded as the primary sensory organ of the human body, and the ocular system as our most reliable means of perceiving the world.

With vision, we travel across vast distances through telescopes to expand our knowledge of the observable universe and peer into the hidden world of atoms through microscopes. At the same time, we seek divinity from apparitions in the clouds, broaden the range of colors visible under closed eyelids, and catch a brief glimpse of the future in clairvoyant dreams.

My photographic practice oscillates across this spectrum. Between reason and intuition, between the measurable …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Heirlooms Of Virtu, Santos Nunez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Heirlooms of Virtu explores familial history as a mode of self-study. By examining childhood, the more possible it can be to navigate the contemporary. Research into the self becomes the bridge between two states of being, allowing for a better understanding and a more purposeful approach to the future.

As an artist working primarily in photography and video, I am recontextualizing key nostalgic concepts with technology through interactive sculptures and video installations. My research alludes to classic toys and technologies specific to my childhood in an effort to find and understand the self. Nostalgia as an idea not only exists …

Back Cover, Michaela Velleno, Erin Robinson, Zoé Shaikh

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Credits, Michaela Velleno, Erin Robinson, Zoé Shaikh

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Artist Index, Sam Arrigoni

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

'Untitled (Works On Memory)', Itzel Camarillo-Gonzalez

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.