Meta Specter
Savannah Calhoun
April 4-May 15, 2025
Opening Reception: April 4, 6-9pm
Free and open to the public
Aurora PhotoCenter, Efroymson Gallery
1125 Brookside Avenue, Suite C9, Indianapolis
Savannah Calhoun’s series Meta Specter addresses themes of mortality and haunting by tying those concepts to the fleeting nature of photography and its connections to nostalgia. Her work includes still lives, digital collages, photo murals, and installations and is deeply inspired by the writings of Grafton Tanner and Mark Fisher.
Meta Specter examines a space of temporariness and, ultimately, death within photography. With death also comes haunting, and the term "hauntology" refers to the “return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.” This idea is heavily tied to nostalgia, and as an instrument of the past, photography resonates well with it.
The idea of being “haunted” by something can be compared to media repeating itself. In a society plagued by late-stage capitalism, we yearn for a utopian society that never came to manifest in the 21st century. Technology has become a source of harvesting data for profit rather than a tool to unite and connect people. Formerly optimistic about the future, it has not shaped itself the way that we used to believe it would, and the things we used to believe would save us are now a source of monotony.
Concerning imagemaking, this series uses symbols of photography’s moving parts and pieces within its imagery to discuss the medium’s position in our contemporary culture. These objects and symbols include the transparency layer in photoshop, cameras, film canisters, external photographs, and so on. Considering hauntology as a theme within the work, Meta Specter serves to speak about photography from within. The death of the future is ever-present within photography as a medium due to the abundance of images and the wake of artificial intelligence.
Savannah Calhoun (she/her) is an image-based artist who focuses on post-internet art and nostalgia. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries including Ohio University Art Galleries in Athens, OH, Gallery 924 in Indianapolis, IN, Glasgow Gallery of Photography in Glasgow, Scotland, George Caleb Bingham Gallery in Columbia, MO, Columbia Art League in Columbia, MO, Sheldon Galleries in St. Louis, MO, and others. She received a BFA in Photography at Herron School of Art and Design and an MFA at the University of Missouri. She lives and works in Muncie, Indiana where she is a photography technician at Ball State University.