Sandra Erbacher
TIIC
March 16 - May 12, 2018
Opening Reception - Friday, March 16 5-7p at Border Patrol
Artist Talk - Friday, March 16 7-8p at SPACE Gallery
Photo by Joel Tsui
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Border Patrol presents TIIC, a satellite project by Sandra Erbacher in conjucntion with her exhibition, Geometry of Oppression, on view at SPACE (538 Congress St.).
For TIIC, Sandra Erbacher presents a suite of seven formal portraits of both Nazi officials and IBM managing directors. Collectively known as Faces of Fascism and Bureaucracy, the portraits are part of an ongoing series of graphite drawings that the artist initially created as a response to Edwin Black’s book, IBM and the Holocaust, which charts the business connections between IBM and the Nazi regime. In the process of drawing, the artist's initial concern to chart the parallels between fascism and bureaucracy--evident here in the authoritative expressions, formal business attire and homogeneity of race and gender--extended to an interest in the assumed status of the archive as a neutral container for an objective, historical truth. Erbacher aims to construct an archive that casts the boundaries between fact and fiction into doubt; in fact, the portraits of IBM directors and Nazi officials appear almost interchangeable. The work poses questions about the ways in which dominant power relationships are tied up with the creation and governance of an archive or narrative history and how such an archive shapes one’s relationship to the past, present and future. The more deliberately obscure exhibition title, TIIC (an acronym for The Idiots in Charge) is taken from the eponymous neon artwork in the gallery’s back room. Extracted from its particular corporate context, TIIC alludes to business jargon, occupational acronyms, and corporate communications. This commonplace if not irrational class of language is traditionally employed by government agencies as a tactic of abstraction and reinforced by the gallery’s intentional resemblance to an office waiting room. |
OPENING RECEPTION EVENTS
Friday, March 16, 2018 5:00-7:00pm Gallery open hours at Border Patrol 6:00-7:00pm Gallery open hours at SPACE 7:00pm - 8:00pm Artist talk at SPACE Border Patrol will host an opening reception for TIIC, a satellite project in conjunction with Erbacher's exhibition, Geometry of Oppression (SPACE Gallery). Sandra Erbacher will discuss the exhibitions as well as her process as an artist working from existing archives and drawing on archival modes of presentation. She will be joined by Sarah Hamerman, an art librarian and researcher who currently works at the MoMA Library. Co-Presented by SPACE Gallery Sandra Erbacher is a German artist living and working in New Jersey and New York. She has degrees in Sociology and Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths College, London, and earned her BFA from Camberwell College of Art, London (2009) and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2014). She has exhibited nationally and internationally, at Spring/Break, NYC, Grin Providence, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Circuit 12 Contemporary, Dallas, The Contemporary, London, Kunstverein Speyer, Germany, Umbrella Gallery, Leeds, and Five Years, London. She is a current Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace resident (2017-18). Her work is included in the Fidelity Investments Corporate Art Collection and numerous other private collections.
View more of Sandra's work here and on Instagram. |
