Annie Briard
b. in Montreal, Quebec. lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
CV
Annie Briard is a Canadian artist whose work challenges visual perception. Through video, expanded photography and installation, she explores the intersections between perception paradigms in psychology, neuroscience and existentialism. Her inspiration is drawn from strange encounters with the visible and a desire to survey these with others.
Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions across Canada, notably at Mónica Reyes Gallery and VIVO (Vancouver), Joyce Yahouda Gallery (Montreal), La maison des artistes visuels (Winnipeg), and Center 3 (Hamilton) as well as featuring in numerous group shows. Recent inclusions cover Access Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver), Art Souterrain (Montreal), The Rooms (St-John's), Three Shadows Photography Centre (Beijing). She has also participated in international festivals, fairs and screenings at the Lincoln Film Centre New York, Filmambiante Int'l Film Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Matadero Madrid, and the Switzerland Architecture Museum, among others. Her practice has been awarded funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Art Council, and several publications have discussed her recent work, found in the pages of Espace Art Actuel and on the cover of Liaison magazine.
She holds a BFA from Concordia University, and a Master's from Emily Carr University, where she currently teaches and manages the visiting artist program.
CV
Annie Briard is a Canadian artist whose work challenges visual perception. Through video, expanded photography and installation, she explores the intersections between perception paradigms in psychology, neuroscience and existentialism. Her inspiration is drawn from strange encounters with the visible and a desire to survey these with others.
Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions across Canada, notably at Mónica Reyes Gallery and VIVO (Vancouver), Joyce Yahouda Gallery (Montreal), La maison des artistes visuels (Winnipeg), and Center 3 (Hamilton) as well as featuring in numerous group shows. Recent inclusions cover Access Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver), Art Souterrain (Montreal), The Rooms (St-John's), Three Shadows Photography Centre (Beijing). She has also participated in international festivals, fairs and screenings at the Lincoln Film Centre New York, Filmambiante Int'l Film Festival (Rio de Janeiro), Matadero Madrid, and the Switzerland Architecture Museum, among others. Her practice has been awarded funding from the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Art Council, and several publications have discussed her recent work, found in the pages of Espace Art Actuel and on the cover of Liaison magazine.
She holds a BFA from Concordia University, and a Master's from Emily Carr University, where she currently teaches and manages the visiting artist program.
UPCOMING EXHIBITION
Annie Briard: All the Light you Cannot See I Mónica Reyes Gallery + Capture Photography Festival I April 9
**Opening cancelled, BUT the show and artist talk will be viewable online at www.monicareyesgallery.com from April 9th. The physical exhibition may or may not be open by appointment. Please email for details: mr@monicareyesgallery.com**
All the Light You Cannot See presents multidisciplinary artist Annie Briard’s latest exploration into the poetics of vision. The work presented in this solo exhibition take up additive and subtractive colour and light waves revealing the visible spectrum through photographic processes and modes of display.
Inspired by the fiery skies of the western coasts, and the starkness of the desert landscape, the celestial representations evoke the romanticized image of sunsets, science fiction atmospheres, and the Aurora Borealis. With shifting ecologies, and environmental changes that seem at once imperceptible and extreme, the perception and sensation produced by Briard’s new series bring to mind a desire to see, a comfort in return, and the passivity of beauty.
Colour-shifting horizon lines and skyscapes are artificially produced using photographic images and programmed LED lightboxes, and celluloid projections blur and expand the definitions of natural light. Briard’s interest in our perception of light, colour, and the natural environment manifests as cyclical, shifting, meditative colour fields, as viewers bathe in a glow of past, present, and future. The colours that shift become just a memory, or capacity of vision. As the cycles unfold, knowing is undone, and perception begins.
Supported by a Tricera Printing Grant.
**Opening cancelled, BUT the show and artist talk will be viewable online at www.monicareyesgallery.com from April 9th. The physical exhibition may or may not be open by appointment. Please email for details: mr@monicareyesgallery.com**
All the Light You Cannot See presents multidisciplinary artist Annie Briard’s latest exploration into the poetics of vision. The work presented in this solo exhibition take up additive and subtractive colour and light waves revealing the visible spectrum through photographic processes and modes of display.
Inspired by the fiery skies of the western coasts, and the starkness of the desert landscape, the celestial representations evoke the romanticized image of sunsets, science fiction atmospheres, and the Aurora Borealis. With shifting ecologies, and environmental changes that seem at once imperceptible and extreme, the perception and sensation produced by Briard’s new series bring to mind a desire to see, a comfort in return, and the passivity of beauty.
Colour-shifting horizon lines and skyscapes are artificially produced using photographic images and programmed LED lightboxes, and celluloid projections blur and expand the definitions of natural light. Briard’s interest in our perception of light, colour, and the natural environment manifests as cyclical, shifting, meditative colour fields, as viewers bathe in a glow of past, present, and future. The colours that shift become just a memory, or capacity of vision. As the cycles unfold, knowing is undone, and perception begins.
Supported by a Tricera Printing Grant.
PAST EXHIBITIONS
Paracosmic Sun | 2017
What we see of the world results from a complex interplay of unstable systems. Vision is a wondrous affair, navigating the line between acts of deciphering and of creating. Our perceived surroundings are a collection of images formed through the intricate workings of our senses, and the impressions prescribed by mood, memory and so much more.
There is no fixed reality; it is a product of myriad conditions, which at times conflict. Vast knowledge can be derived from sight, but is it ever the same for us all? From one instance to another? How much of what we see is actual? How much is fabricated?
Staring at the Sun poses these questions through an immersive experience in which we are asked to consider the visible spectrum. Here, colour is both perceived and produced by the body and mind. What we see reflects at once the light of the rainbow and its negative. The limits between the tangible and the imagined collapse into a dizzied blur of colour and invisibility.
Paracosmic Sun | 2017
What we see of the world results from a complex interplay of unstable systems. Vision is a wondrous affair, navigating the line between acts of deciphering and of creating. Our perceived surroundings are a collection of images formed through the intricate workings of our senses, and the impressions prescribed by mood, memory and so much more.
There is no fixed reality; it is a product of myriad conditions, which at times conflict. Vast knowledge can be derived from sight, but is it ever the same for us all? From one instance to another? How much of what we see is actual? How much is fabricated?
Staring at the Sun poses these questions through an immersive experience in which we are asked to consider the visible spectrum. Here, colour is both perceived and produced by the body and mind. What we see reflects at once the light of the rainbow and its negative. The limits between the tangible and the imagined collapse into a dizzied blur of colour and invisibility.
The Constructions Series | 2015
Re-envisioning vision. Exploring the boundaries between the physical and the imagined, the perceived, and the misperceived. Constructions uses landscapes as structures through which to investigate and pull apart these territories of sight. What we see is constantly in transformation. The scene before us changes with the faded recollection of what was experienced seconds ago. Beyond how the mind transforms what is understood as actual, the body itself manipulates sight. Vision can only reveal what has already been. Blind spots speckle our field of view and afterimages happen every split second but we cancel them out. What else is hidden?
I create these stereoscopic photographs from backpacking trips to investigate our inability to accurately grasp the world. These images confront us with paradoxical vision. First, there is the flat, colorful image of a wondrous place. Then, with glasses on, there is red, or blue, if one eye is shut. The combined 3D image shows a fourth perspective where the scene’s planes appear to jut outwards or recede behind the photographic surface. There are others if we focus on the geometric symbols pointing to where the construct breaks down. How can one image be perceived in all these ways?
Through this series, I explore what drives me ever onwards: how does what I see compare to what you see? How much does vision make our worlds stray from each other’s? Why is the seen prioritized over the daydreamed, the imagined, when sometimes they can be so alike?
Re-envisioning vision. Exploring the boundaries between the physical and the imagined, the perceived, and the misperceived. Constructions uses landscapes as structures through which to investigate and pull apart these territories of sight. What we see is constantly in transformation. The scene before us changes with the faded recollection of what was experienced seconds ago. Beyond how the mind transforms what is understood as actual, the body itself manipulates sight. Vision can only reveal what has already been. Blind spots speckle our field of view and afterimages happen every split second but we cancel them out. What else is hidden?
I create these stereoscopic photographs from backpacking trips to investigate our inability to accurately grasp the world. These images confront us with paradoxical vision. First, there is the flat, colorful image of a wondrous place. Then, with glasses on, there is red, or blue, if one eye is shut. The combined 3D image shows a fourth perspective where the scene’s planes appear to jut outwards or recede behind the photographic surface. There are others if we focus on the geometric symbols pointing to where the construct breaks down. How can one image be perceived in all these ways?
Through this series, I explore what drives me ever onwards: how does what I see compare to what you see? How much does vision make our worlds stray from each other’s? Why is the seen prioritized over the daydreamed, the imagined, when sometimes they can be so alike?
Annie Briard | Wanderings | 2013
Standing isolated in a forest full of towering trees with tiny agile creatures scurrying between your feet, suddenly you happen upon another face. Wanderings is an exploration of the embodiment of perception, reality, time and place.
Focusing on our environmental relationships, Annie Briard produces open-ended fables within fantastical universes as personal experiences for the viewer. Her works are created through diverse media but focus on utilizing the moving image as a means to blur the distinction between reality and perception.
Wanderings marks Briard's first solo exhibition of work in Vancouver. Featured within the exhibition is her interactive stop-motion animation, The Woods (2012), a work that affords you the chance to speak with it only as much as it speaks back at you. In ‘choose your own adventure’ style, viewers communicate with the main character Cecilia, through text messages and movement, prompting different surrealist inspired fable-like narrative moments and actions. Through its playfulness and unique aesthetic, the work questions the limits between dream and reality, human made worlds and nature, and structures of communication and domination. The Woods will subsequently be touring across Canada at Centre 3 (Hamilton), Joyce Yahouda Gallery (Montreal), and VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver).
View interaction documentation: http://vimeo.com/51083771
Standing isolated in a forest full of towering trees with tiny agile creatures scurrying between your feet, suddenly you happen upon another face. Wanderings is an exploration of the embodiment of perception, reality, time and place.
Focusing on our environmental relationships, Annie Briard produces open-ended fables within fantastical universes as personal experiences for the viewer. Her works are created through diverse media but focus on utilizing the moving image as a means to blur the distinction between reality and perception.
Wanderings marks Briard's first solo exhibition of work in Vancouver. Featured within the exhibition is her interactive stop-motion animation, The Woods (2012), a work that affords you the chance to speak with it only as much as it speaks back at you. In ‘choose your own adventure’ style, viewers communicate with the main character Cecilia, through text messages and movement, prompting different surrealist inspired fable-like narrative moments and actions. Through its playfulness and unique aesthetic, the work questions the limits between dream and reality, human made worlds and nature, and structures of communication and domination. The Woods will subsequently be touring across Canada at Centre 3 (Hamilton), Joyce Yahouda Gallery (Montreal), and VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver).
View interaction documentation: http://vimeo.com/51083771