Darkness and Nothing More, Elizabeth Claffey

Elizabeth Claffey. Exterior 2, from the project Darkness and Nothing More, 2019 – Ongoing. Archival inkjet print. 40 x 53 inches. Edition of 10.

 

Darkness and Nothing More
Elizabeth Claffey
 
October 29 – December 11, 2021

 

The Alice Wilds is honored to present Darkness and Nothing More, an exhibition by Elizabeth M. Claffey, Assistant Professor of Photography at Indiana University in Bloomington. This will be Claffey’s first solo exhibition at The Alice Wilds. There will be an opening reception on Friday, October 29 from 5-8pm; the artist will be in attendance. The exhibition will be on view through Saturday, December 11, 2021.

Darkness and Nothing More explores the nighttime landscape of family life, as well as identity formation and performance. At night, I check on my children over and over, at first because they require it but later because it soothes my own anxieties. After they fall asleep, I get to watch them at a distance – with my body intact, untouched, un-smothered – and see them, still. They seem small again. Their slow breaths fill me with warmth while slight movements challenge my nervous system for fear that I’ve been too brazen, lingered too long in this moment where everyone is here and safe. The familial labor and love that happens at night is incredibly intimate and moving through darkness is a metaphor for parenthood itself. Nighttime is when the heart rate slows, body temperature drops, and our mammalian instincts for physical closeness heighten. The sensory longing for touch, the compression of another body, is what often wakes my children in the night and has us all moving through the dark to find one another.

On our way, I find small clues of their inner lives: rocks carefully placed throughout the hallway, ribbons mark the spaces between their fantasies. I photograph these still lives like they are clues to a larger mystery, evidence, or communication of a story nobody will tell. At times, our bodies become the surprise revealed in the night because during these years, we are body on body on body, performing gestures that bring our bodies closer to each other and eventually, closer to ourselves, given the power for those gestures and movements to shape our identities. As this ongoing work develops, I turn my gaze toward my partner because intimacy is a significant part of our bond. These works are a way of reclaiming the experience of desire so often denied women in their postpartum lives despite how much that sensuality can reinforce the rich experience of family life.

As our daughters get older, they have become more nervous about nighttime. They too worry that something might go wrong, a mystery that is not their own might be lingering outside our door or in their closet. I tuck them in at night, promising to check on them, and tell them to rest assured. It’s Darkness and Nothing More.

Elizabeth M. Claffey is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Indiana University in Bloomington, a 2019-20 Research Fellow at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction and a 2012 William J. Fulbright Fellow. She has an MFA in Studio Art from Texas Woman’s University, where she also earned a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies. Before joining the faculty at IU, she participated in The Eddie Adams Workshop and freelanced for various organizations and publications including The Dallas Morning News, NBC Universal Studios, and the United Nations Women’s Fund. In 2017 her work was selected for a Center Santa Fe Director’s Choice Award by Kim Sajet of the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. In 2021, she was awarded an Outstanding Junior Faculty Award and an IU Presidential Award for Research and Creative Activity. Elizabeth’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and focuses on identity, kinship, isolation, issues of the body, family history, and cultural/institutional practices. 

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