Annie Briard
b. in Montreal, Quebec. lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
CV
Annie Briard is a Canadian visual art and media artist whose work challenges how we make sense of the world through visual perception. Creating lens-based and light-focused works, she explores the intersections between perception paradigms in psychology, neuroscience and existentialism.
Her moving images, media installations, expanded and print photography works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including "Second Sight” at AC Institute (New York, 2019), “Paracosmic Sun" at Monica Reyes Gallery (Vancouver, 2017), "Staring at the Sun" at Joyce Yahouda Gallery (Montreal, 2016), as well as group shows, festivals and fairs internationally, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Mur (Montreal), Three Shadows Photography Centre (Beijing), the Lincoln Film Centre New York, Matadero Madrid, the Switzerland Architecture Museum, among many others. Recently, she presented large-scale public art projects for a number of commissions in Canada. Sourcing inspiration from the affectation of new and/or altered sights, she regularly undertakes art residencies, which have included working in New York, Los Angeles, Spain, Iceland, as well as long-haul hikes across the North American back country. Annie Briard’s work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.
Briard holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
CV
Annie Briard is a Canadian visual art and media artist whose work challenges how we make sense of the world through visual perception. Creating lens-based and light-focused works, she explores the intersections between perception paradigms in psychology, neuroscience and existentialism.
Her moving images, media installations, expanded and print photography works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including "Second Sight” at AC Institute (New York, 2019), “Paracosmic Sun" at Monica Reyes Gallery (Vancouver, 2017), "Staring at the Sun" at Joyce Yahouda Gallery (Montreal, 2016), as well as group shows, festivals and fairs internationally, including at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Mur (Montreal), Three Shadows Photography Centre (Beijing), the Lincoln Film Centre New York, Matadero Madrid, the Switzerland Architecture Museum, among many others. Recently, she presented large-scale public art projects for a number of commissions in Canada. Sourcing inspiration from the affectation of new and/or altered sights, she regularly undertakes art residencies, which have included working in New York, Los Angeles, Spain, Iceland, as well as long-haul hikes across the North American back country. Annie Briard’s work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.
Briard holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
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.
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.
Annie Briard | In Possible Lands | Outdoor Installation | Art Gallery at Evergreen
In Possible Lands (2020) pairs superimposed photographs of the landscape—one captured 45 years ago by the artist’s father, and the other a present-day image taken by Annie Briard—that together evoke a sense of wonder with their vivid colours and majestic yet familiar subjects. But examined up close, they reveal a world altered by human action.
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ANNIE BRIARD
shares her thoughts about the COVID-19 situation from Vancouver, BC. March 26, 2020 |
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PAST EXHIBITIONS at Mónica Reyes Gallery (formerly Back Gallery Project)
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