SANDRA ERBACHER - Can You See What I See

CAN YOU SEE WHAT I SEE, 2023

perfect-bound book, 90 pages, edition of 25; afterword by Carmen Winant;

Copies can be purchase via Printed Matter and Center for Book Arts, NYC

$38

Can You See What I See? adopts the format of the Children’s Activity Book to examine how ways of seeing are learned, rehearsed, and normalized from early childhood. Traditionally designed to be both educational and entertaining, activity books rely on games and puzzles that reward attention, pattern recognition, and visual mastery. In this project, those familiar devices are repurposed to foreground the uneasy relationship between education and warfare.

The book’s coloring pages replace benign imagery with line-based compositions derived from contemporary and historical military camouflage patterns. Camouflage—engineered to disrupt perception and obscure bodies—becomes the subject of an activity meant to cultivate visual clarity. What appears as a calming exercise instead confronts systems designed to evade detection, turning coloring into an encounter with perceptual instability.

Word Search puzzles prompt readers to identify missiles, drones, and fighter jets named after animals or natural phenomena, drawing attention to the linguistic strategies that render military technologies familiar and disarming. Language functions here as a softening mechanism, masking violence through metaphor and play.

Recurring “Spot the Sniper” images draw on the logic of the Hidden Object Puzzle, asking viewers to locate a concealed figure within dense compositions. Detection becomes success; invisibility becomes failure. The game quietly trains a militarized mode of attention, where vigilance is framed as skill.

Drawing on archival research alongside observations of the artist’s own daughter’s education and media consumption, Can You See What I See? traces how visual literacy, play, and instruction intersect with histories of violence. By inhabiting a format associated with innocence and care, the project reveals how systems of warfare are embedded not only in images of conflict, but in the subtle pedagogies through which seeing itself is learned.

The War At Home

Activity books are a genre I didn’t know existed before having children. Part play, part instructional, they are at once literary (word play) and anti-literary (thinking through visual expression). It goes like this: when I need to answer an email, or wash the dishes, or change the laundry, or take a shit, or call my own mother, I put my children in front of activity books. Here, I say. Do these. They are rife with mazes, rudimentary math problems, coloring, word search games, doodling prompts. My kids – who are both at the liminal ages somewhere between illiterate and literate – are the perfect audience for this. I watch them dive into these books, shrieking with pleasure as they connect the dots or match the colors, and wonder when the last time was that I felt so much pleasure from engaging a book. For this reason, we have dozens of activity books around the house, and often return to old, used up ones, erasing past equations and check marks (which snowmen match? Which sunset is the odd one out?) to return to the same problems – the same activities – again and again.

In this way, activity books have served as an aid, and an innocuous presence in my life; I think many parents feel this way. Which is precisely why Sandra Erbacher’s project stings in the way it does. It all feels strikingly familiar: find the camouflaged object (here, a sniper), find the word (tornado, a kind of fighter jet), spot the difference between (tanks), and on it goes. This isn’t simply a matter of applying the form, one seemingly harmless tool (the activity book) to a sinister set of images (the armed conflict machine). Instead, the book startles me precisely because they are not so apart to begin with. Moving back and forward though its pages, I am reminded that the methods of these books, which teach logic, tactic, and decoding ciphers, are not so far removed from the expediencies of war. And I am reminded of the way that war is treated as game, in our imaginations, in the media, and through drone killings. In Erbacher’s hands, fantasy, battle plans, children’s play: it all bleeds together, as curious as it is menacing.

Carmen Winant, June 13, Columbus, OH