In Aurora’s Efroymson Gallery starting April 4, Savannah Calhoun mines 80s and 90s pop culture to evoke an uneasy sense of nostalgia in her series Meta Specter. Bright gradients, checkerboard patterns, palm trees straight from the set of Miami Vice, and compact disks float across the glossy surface of Calhoun’s large-scale collages and photo murals. These blasts from the past recall a supposedly simpler time, one lived by some and seen by others in Stranger Things, a time without cell phones and ubiquitous screens. Using color and lighting from commercial product photography, Calhoun’s Meta Specter resonates with America’s current moment and rhetoric that sells an idealized version of the Reagan Era as a political and cultural ideal, ignoring the injustices and unrest of the time. Meta Specter reminds us that escaping the echo chamber of nostalgia and technology might be the most important disruption of our time, one that gets us back to a better future.

In the Main Gallery, the exhibition Trained Histories, featuring work by Minne Atairu, Michael Borowski, Jim Naughten, and Phillip Toledano, examines the intersection of history and AI, revealing how AI can investigate, give visibility to, and reimagine various histories while questioning the very nature of truth in photography. In Aurora’s Main Gallery until April 15.