Eli Backer

Eli Backer (b. 1992, Seattle) is an artist, composer, and engineer. Her practice is not media specific, carrying threads of memory, loss, and community across music, sculpture, design, photography, glass, printmaking, film, textiles, ceramics, and metal. She is driven by the people and machines she surrounds herself with, and is interested in the communities they form, even when just between two people. Constantly creating visual and audio records of life around her, these run through or parallel to her work, lifting the everyday past solely formal and experiential. A practicing DJ of 15 years, Backer’s sets balance past and present, capturing musical friendships and memories, while creating common space and dialogue with the crowd around her. On and off the dancefloor, her work offers peace, places of rest, escape, and safety. She fervently believes that sharing what is closest to her heart allows others to feel less alone in their struggles.

She has taught university courses on memory and site, as well as at makerspaces on fabrication– from machine embroidery, to ceramic 3d printing, to circuit design and assembly, to printmaking, to metalworking. During the pandemic she ran a print shop out of her home in rural Pennsylvania, and endured isolation by sending a flurry of postcards and other ephemera, an aspect of her social practice which endures to this day.