Arizona Illustrated

Matt Cotten is a painter, puppeteer and performer based in Tucson. He explores memory, time and entropy in his artwork. He uses abstraction to reveal decay and disorder in urban spaces. Places disintegrate and stories dissolve into traces of color and layers of light in his paintings. He uses expressionistic figure to visualize the flow of time and its organic effects on us. His paintings suggest that each of us is but a tiny facet in an expansive natural world. Tucson Tuesday Laughter Yoga has been meeting weekly to practice laughter yoga together since 2010. Popularized by physician Madan Kataria, it is now practiced in more than fifty-three countries. Based on the belief that voluntary laughter provides the same benefits as spontaneous laughter with reducing stress by producing dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins. I Am You 360 is a tiny home development organization which provides housing for youths (age 18-22) transitioning out of the Tucson Foster Care system. The idea is to buy the land and to bank half of each resident’s $1 per-square foot rent, which they pay on the 450-square-foot home, into a savings account that they can later use for a down-payment on a starter home of their own once they’re ready to move out. I Am You 360 believes in empowering the whole person by utilizing programs like self-improvement, financial stability, and community services to create generational change. Dogs! A Science Tail. Is an interactive exhibit at the Arizona Science Center. What is a dog’s sense of sight and smell like? Why have they developed an emotional bond with humans? Those are questions this exhibit, open to the public, seeks to answer.