Artist Statement
Sandra Erbacher’s interdisciplinary practice examines ideology and power through the lens of institutional systems, archives, and material culture. Using political montage as a tool, she deconstructs the visual and textual language of authority, exposing the mechanisms that shape dominant narratives. Through the juxtaposition of image and text, she reveals contradictions, gaps, and the instability of historical truth.
Her work foregrounds the exclusions and erasures within archival structures, questioning whose histories are preserved and whose are silenced. By repurposing bureaucratic aesthetics, military motifs, and corporate design, she unveils the violence embedded in everyday systems of order. Through strategies of remix and recontextualization, she disrupts institutional narratives, making visible the ideological frameworks that sustain power. In embracing doubt and fragmentation, her work resists fixed representation, creating space for critical engagement with history, memory, and systems of control.
Installation plays a vital role in her practice, creating immersive environments that engage the audience spatially and experientially. By manipulating scale, placement, and materiality, she disrupts conventional display methods, exposing the institutional mechanisms that shape perception and authority. Her installations recontextualize architectural forms and bureaucratic structures—cubicles, waiting rooms, museum design—confronting viewers with the physical and psychological constraints of these systems. This spatial engagement sharpens awareness of power dynamics and the subtle ways ideology permeates designed environments.
Artist books serve as a crucial site for research and experimentation within Erbacher’s practice, allowing for an intimate and tactile engagement with archival material. By employing strategies of sequencing, layering, and fragmentation, she transforms the book format into a space of inquiry—where histories can be dismantled, reassembled, and reinterpreted. Through the act of reading and handling, the viewer is implicated in the process of meaning-making, reinforcing the instability of historical narratives.
A recent project, Invasive Species, which incorporated photographic prints, drawings, and a video installation, seeks to compare and contrast the discourse on invasive species in the natural sciences with the media rhetoric surrounding immigration. Her artist book Can You See What I See, interrogates the intersection of warfare and education, employing puzzles and coloring pages to unsettle the presumed innocence of childhood learning tools. Twitching, trembling, twinning, freckling is an immersive triple-channel video projection that interrogates the legacy of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The piece contrasts footage from a dairy and beef livestock show at Bangor State Fair, ME, with text-based excerpts from the Trait Book used by eugenic fieldworkers to classify individuals as “desirable” or “undesirable.” This archival language, rife with diagnostic terms, offers a chilling reflection of eugenic thought—categorizing human beings in the same way livestock were graded for breeding.
By weaving together historical fragments, institutional critique, and spatial interventions, Erbacher's practice challenges dominant narratives and exposes the ideological forces that shape collective memory. Her work invites viewers to reconsider the structures that govern knowledge and power, fostering a space for inquiry, resistance, and reimagination.
Artist-CV-2024-ERBACHER.pdf