Please join us at Aurora for First Friday’s opening of the exhibition Heart’s Content in the Main Gallery. The exhibition Heart’s Content, with work by the 2025 BFA Photography Seniors from the Herron School of Art & Design at IU Indianapolis, explores photography’s relationship to identity through a range of processes and media, including photographic collage, lenticular, cyanotype, weaving, and video. Using photography to examine the many factors that influence and shape identity, the artists ask us to take a deeper look at what we think we know about ourselves. Through their work, Leah Darden, Kayla Harvey, Sarah Montañez-Hidalgo, Sarah McCartney, Emma Seewald, Dee Smith, and Michelle Watson, share a key part of being an artist — that the questions we ask are oftentimes more important than the answers. The artists will be present in the gallery for the opening and will give brief talks about their work starting at 6pm. To May 16.

In Aurora’s Efroymson Gallery, 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. To May 16.