Artist Statement

Eli Burke is an interdisciplinary artist working across drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, and installation, exploring themes of loss, identity, queer embodiment, magic, empathy, and vulnerability. Burke earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a PhD in Art and Visual Culture Education from the University of Arizona. In addition to their solo practice, Burke collaborates with their cousin, photographer Jesse Burke, creating work that engages trans embodiment, masculinity, and transformation within the Sonoran Desert, Eli’s home for over two decades.

In my work, elements come together in installations and images that combine fragmented narrative and poetics. While maintaining a commitment to story, these fragments widen interpretation, displacing the constraints of time, persona, and cultural context. Through both solo and collaborative practices, I create spaces where poetry, through lyricism and metaphor, invites viewers to enter on their own terms. My relationship to space stems from solitude and the need to find or create environments (often in nature) where judgment is suspended, and to queer spaces where it is not.

As I consider personal experience, my intention is not simply to transform space, but to arrange elements so that space itself becomes personal. In my collaborative photographic work with Jesse Burke, the desert becomes an active participant, its shifting, resilient landscape reflecting the fluidity, vulnerability, and strength of the trans body. Across all of my work, I seek to personalize that which is often objectified, creating openings where subjectivity can be felt, held, and reconsidered.

I am interested in the idea that to be defined, there must be something that defines, some form of “other.” Like space, identity requires relation to exist. I invite viewers to see farther and look harder, and through the fragmented representation of my own experiences, to consider their own.