Annie Briard | Constructions 5
- Annie Briard 2015
- Constructions 5 (Muir Pass, California)
- Stereoscopic c-print
- 28” x 28”, ed.1/3
Annie Briard
b. in Montreal, Quebec. lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
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 Back Gallery Project 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.
About the Constructions Series
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?