This large-scale cameraless photograph is part of the Mimesis series. This piece is based on an experience of someone approaching me and saying "I didn't realize you were half!" Half of what, I said… This large-scale cameraless photograph is part of the Mimesis series. This piece is based on an experience of someone approaching me and saying "I didn't realize you were half!" Half of what, I said to myself, half of what? I know from my experiences half of what but there is an incredible violence to halving someone – bisecting someone, adhering to the racial constructs that say there are fundamental differences between people, and thus someone like me must be a composite of multiple parts of other people. It was this time, I determined I am not half of anything.
Claire A. Warden is an interdisciplinary artist who works in still and moving image media. Her work engages and challenges representation, portraiture, racialized experience, and language in the United States through abstraction and experimental image-making in multi-year projects. She received a…Claire A. Warden is an interdisciplinary artist who works in still and moving image media. Her work engages and challenges representation, portraiture, racialized experience, and language in the United States through abstraction and experimental image-making in multi-year projects. She received a BFA and BA from Arizona State University and a MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024, where she received a New Artist Society full merit scholarship. Warden’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at Colorado Photographic Arts Center, Pictura Gallery, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, and The University of Kansas Art & Design Gallery. She has been named LensCulture's Top 50 Emerging Talents, Photo Boite’s 30 Under 30 Women Photographers, and a Clarence John Laughlin Award finalist. She received an Artist Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a Puffin Foundation Grant, Philadelphia Photo Arts Center Contemporary Photography Exhibition award and the Ed Friedman Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography. Her work has been featured in publications, including Harper’s Magazine, Real Simple magazine, Der Greif Magazine, Strange Fire Collective, Prism Magazine, Lenscratch, Diffusion Magazine and Light Work’s Contact Sheet. Warden was awarded artist residencies through the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists, Art Intersection, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, LATITUDE, ACRE, and Light Work.
