Beholden
Eli Craven
January 5-April 5, 2024
Opening January 5, 6-9pm
Free and open to the public
Aurora PhotoCenter Main Gallery
Eli Craven reconsiders gesture and touch through the photograph. In his work, images of faces and bodies, often sampled from far flung and anonymous archival photographs, are disrupted, reconnected, and layered in ambiguous ways, with the final result sometimes implying the tense passion of a first embrace. Craven heightens this latent sensuality by juxtaposing the photographic image with natural materials, often beautiful woods, that both interrupt and stabilize the human bodies in his collages.
Identities and roles in Craven’s work are fluid and defy easy definition. The classic markers of identify — the face and eyes — are often obscured or covered, leaving a tantalizing impression of the players, a photographic flirtation. Craven questions the notion of photography as the record-keeping medium, one that describes without bias or opinion. In his collages, screens, and overlays, Craven explores how photography obscures just as much about identity and its representation as it reveals. His images can be, at times, confusing and confounding. In the strange dance created in his assemblages, we could be witnessing a medical examination or the beginning of a beautiful romance.
Craven’s Beholden evokes a haptic response, reminding us that the body is infinite in its expressiveness, interpretation, and fragility. That Craven created some of this work during the pandemic underscores both the vulnerability and resilience of our flesh and blood.
Beholden brings together images and sculptural pieces from several of Craven’s long-term projects, including Soap Opera, PPS, and First-Aid and Living Anatomy, as well as visual research completed when the artist was the 2022 Aurora + Herron Resident. Included in exhibition are three mural-size works that expand the artist’s typical print scale and the size of the wood overlays that complete the murals. Together with Tsar Fedosrsky’s The Quarry Project on view in the Project Gallery, Aurora’s Spring 2024 exhibitions explore current themes and methods for photographic artists working in abstraction.
Eli Craven is an artist based in Lafayette, Indiana, where he is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Purdue University. Craven’s research resides in the critical investigation of the image and its relationship to ideologies of sexuality, desire, and death. His work is exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently at KlompChing Gallery in Brooklyn, New York, at the South Bend Museum of Art's 31st Biennial, and at Feinkunst Krüger Gallery in Hamburg, Germany. His work has also been widely published. Select publications and clients include Philosophie Magazine, The Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, Gestalten Publishing Berlin, Penguin Random House Barcelona, and The Paris National Opera.
Annual operating support for Aurora PhotoCenter provided by the City of Indianapolis through the Indy Arts Council. Additional support provided by the Efroymson Family Fund.