Residency Program

Artist’s Publications

2025

We are excited to share the work of our 2025 Penumbra Foundation Risograph Publication Residents.

Crowd Psychology
Sandra Erbacher

“Crowd Psychology’ is an artist book that examines the volatile and mesmerizing nature of collective behavior. Engaging with Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 text The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, this project interrogates the mechanisms that shape mass psychology—impulsiveness, contagion, suggestion, and the dissolution of individual identity within the collective.

Through a carefully curated juxtaposition of images, ‘Crowd Psychology’ weaves together visual fragments from biology, science, history, warfare, art and design, the animal kingdom, medicine, ethnography, anthropology, and finance. This constellation of imagery reflects the many faces of crowd dynamics—from the natural world’s swarm intelligence to human history’s most charged political spectacles.

At its core, ‘Crowd Psychology’ questions the balance between power and vulnerability within the collective experience. It asks: Where does authority reside? How does the crowd shape belief? And to what extent do we, as individuals, resist or surrender to its force?”

-Sandra Erbacher

Mimesis
Clare A. Warden

“The creation of my work comes at a time when the struggle to accept the unfamiliar is pervasive in our culture. When looking at much of my work, the urge to ask “what is it?” echoes the question, “what are you?” – a question directed to me countless times as a person of color with a diverse ethnocultural heritage and one I increasingly tend to resist. That resistance carries through the work as resistance to definition as well as the hegemonic gaze and, instead, emphasizes opacity and illegibility. […]

I believe it is important to know that the ‘Mimesis’ series is photographic—cameraless photographs—and that I developed a process that uses saliva to break down the emulsion of film. What is left is metallic silver and my biologic matter—thus exploring photographic materiality, identity formation, and illegibility. These works of self-portraiture do not show a viewer what I look like but are built from my DNA and shaped by my experiences.”

-Claire A. Warden