ARTIST TALK:
Claire A. Warden
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2026 6-8pm
Join us for an artist talk with Mimesis artist, Claire A. Warden.
Doors open at 6pm and talk will kick off at 6:30.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Phoenix-based Claire A. Warden’s Mimesis reframes the urge to ask “what am I looking at?” within a larger context of ethnic identity. The large, monochromatic alternative process works blur the lines of photography, inviting the viewer to question their experience:
Reflecting on the perception and presentation of identity informs my approach to photography. I spit on and manually manipulate silver halides in the photographic negative as a representation of the inherent natural and cultural forces in a self-aware and conscious existence. This process produces an image that reveals a certain truth in identity and its inadequacies in language. The abstractions resembling systems of the natural sciences—microscopic, topographic and celestial—allegorizes the complexity of systems that make up an individual and the perception of oneself.
Claire A. Warden (b. Montréal, Québec) 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.