From Leaving and Waving by Deanna Dikeman

Opening December 5 in Aurora’s Main Gallery, In the exhibition Relative Moments, Deanna Dikeman’s photographs show the small, quiet moments of life that build a family and bind it together. The artist has documented her Midwestern family for over 45 years. When home to visit, Dikeman photographed her family doing the everyday activities, including washing dishes, hanging laundry, mowing the lawn, and cleaning gutters, that physically maintain a home inside and out. Her photographs also capture the lived moments — sharing cake and ice cream, Dikeman’s father doing a crossword puzzle with his grandson — that connect one family member to another and older generations to younger.

From Relative Moments by Deanna Dikeman

Over the decades she shot the images for Relative Moments, Dikeman always made sure to photograph her parents waving goodbye from the driveway of their home at the end of each visit. This series-within-a-series, entitled Leaving and Waving, uses the framework of serial photography, in which repeated elements, such as the house, parents, and the gesture of waving, provide a context to closely observe changes in Dikeman’s parents and family over time. With images in Leaving and Waving spanning 1991-2017, we see changes both big and small, as broad smiles and waves become quieter, Dikeman’s baby appears in the frame, and eventually, two parents waving becomes one. These shifts from photograph to photograph form a deeply emotional narrative that speaks to the universal human condition of living and loving through life’s inevitable ebbs and flows.

The Aurora PhotoCenter exhibition Relative Moments brings together the series Leaving and Waving with images from the larger body of work for the first time in a unique installation, printed entirely at Aurora, that runs the entire perimeter of the gallery. Both of Dikeman’s books, including the sold-out and rare Leaving and Waving, will be available for viewing in the gallery. Relative Moments will be on view at Aurora PhotoCenter through January 23, 2026, with an opening December 5, 2025, from 6-9pm; the artist will be present in the gallery for the opening to talk about the work and sign books.

Also opening December 5, Atefeh Farajolahzadeh is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice incorporates photography, video, installation, and writing. Her work explores ideas of place, psychogeography, and liminality, with a particular focus on migration. In her newest photo and light installation, The Shore Is the Long Way Home, Farajolahzadeh expresses the uncertainty and cyclical nature of the experience of immigration — psychologically moving, never fully arriving. In this work, water, both as a physical path and a powerful metaphor, is the primary element represented in different forms, shapes, colors, and light to evoke the emotional terrain of migration from one home to another.

The installation consists of photo light boxes that are programmed by a microcontroller, cycling the lights on and off to create shifting patterns of light and shadow. This continuous looping between illumination and darkness creates space for viewers to contemplate the psychological and physical states that define this experience: hope, despair, fear, and the constant struggle for survival.

From the Shore is the Long Way Home by Atefeh Farajolahzadeh