Cali M. Banks
2025 Aurora Project Residency
2025 Aurora Project Resident Cali M. Banks (Munsee Lenape/Scottish) uses her artistic practice to reclaim identity through auto-ethnographic, experimental photography and filmmaking. Her work explores personal and collective histories, relational intimacies, and the expansion of narrow, flattened definitions of indigenous art. She is interested in the idea of image-making as a time- or record-keeper and being able to manipulate that role to recreate memories, history, and methods of healing.
Banks will spend her two weeks at Aurora working on the series /ˈin(t)ərˌlāst/: interlaced, which incorporates images made with emulsion transfers, watergrams. and chemigrams to address themes, as the artist writes, “. . . of disembodiment, especially in regard to how women are seen in society, living in a liminal space of personal culture and history, and trying to conceptualize those bodies into a physical and theoretical space.”
Banks plans to use the first days of the residency to create new work with alternative processes in Aurora’s darkroom, and then to later scan and print the new emulsion transfers, watergrams, and chemigrams on fabric and as large-scale mural inkjet prints. During her time in Indianapolis, Banks also plans to meet with local artists and to lead a workshop on the processes she uses in her work.
Cali M. Banks is a lens-based artist currently based in Syracuse, NY. She holds an MFA in Interdisciplinary Media Arts Practices from the University of Colorado Boulde, and a BA in Art and Technology and Global Health Studies from Allegheny College. Banks is the Communications Coordinator for Light Work and is also an Adjunct Professor of Photography, Video Art and Filmmaking for Syracuse University, Pratt Institute's Munson campus, and Indiana University campuses (online). She was a 2024 En Foco Photography Fellow, a 2024 Penumbra Foundation Workspace Resident, and she received the Fall 2024 Visionary Project Award from Film Photo Award. Recently, Banks has exhibited work during Art Basel Miami and Every Woman Biennial London, and other notable venues such as Smack Mellon, RedLine Contemporary Art Center, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia, Atlanta Film Festival, and Anthology Film Archives, including a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art. Her work has also been published on Lomography, Lenscratch, and Rolling Stone France.
The Aurora Project Residency would not be possible without the following partnership.
Pending scheduling, the resident will stay at Tube Factory Artspace in their artist bed and breakfast located on Cruft Street in the Garfield Park area of Indianapolis. Aurora PhotoCenter thanks Tube Factory Artspace for its generous support of this residency.
