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. 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.
Through strategies of remix and recontextualization, Erbacher 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.
Artist-CV-2024-ERBACHER.pdf