Annie Briard
“In Possible Lands XV”, 2023, 34×34, Inkjet on Epson Luster, Edition of 3
Vision and its affect drive my work. Through a practice rooted in expanded photography, lens-based media, light and the moving image are used as starting points to explore how visual perception shapes our interpretation of the world and of each other. Results become reflective surfaces for the viewer’s own vision of their surroundings and psyche through immersive video, interactive installation and simulated imagery.
I am interested in how perception paradigms differ within psychology, neuroscience and film theory, finding space for creative experimentation within these gaps and intersections. Our sensorial system – physically fallible and influenced by memory, mood, ideology – mediates what we know of our surrounding reality. Sometimes, the limits between our ideal and physical visions become blurred. How, then, does what I see compare to what you see? How does this perception animate our way of being in the world, of encountering wonder, of understanding and communing with one another?
My practice confronts our understanding of what we see by comparing phenomenological experience of the physical to that of the simulated. In order to reach these two poles, in turn, I regularly undertake extreme perceptual activities such as long-haul backpacking trips throughout the North American landscape, or sensory deprivation situations.
By complicating the seen through optical illusions, constructed imagery and explorable scenarios, I create viewing experiences that investigate the layers of perception. These experiences open up spaces to question the problematics of misperception and méconnaissance, advocating for communication systems and processes that are crucial to evolving the way humans relate to the world and each other within a spirit of love.
-Annie Briard
Recently collected by the Canada Council Art Bank, Annie Briard (BFA, MFA) is a Canadian artist known for her practice in expanded photography and digital media. Her 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 have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including “Staring at the Sun” at La Bande vidéo for the Quebec Biennale (Québec, 2022), “Within the Eclipse” at the Burrard Arts Foundation (Vancouver, 2021), “Second Sight” at AC Institute (New York, 2019), “Sight Shifting” at Joyce Yahouda Gallery (Montréal, 2014), as well as group shows, festivals and fairs internationally at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Mûr (Montréal), Three Shadows Photography Centre (Beijing), the Lincoln Film Centre New York, Matadero Madrid, the Switzerland Architecture Museum, among many others. Recently, she presented monumental scale photographic and moving-image public art projects for a number of commissions in Canada. She has been artist-in-residence at SIM in Reykjavik, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Eastside Los Angeles and others. Annie Briard’s work has received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and is found in the collections of the Art Bank of Canada, Microsoft, Scotiabank, Caisse de Dépôt et Placement du Québec and others.
Briard is a Lecturer in photography and media arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design
SUN SIMULATIONS
Custom full spectrum color-changing lightbox, USB plug
With Sun Simulations, Briard continues her preoccupation with light and subjectivity, with an added meditation on the digitization of human experience. Consisting of a contemporary, color-changing kinetic “stained glass window,” this […] simulates the effect of sunlight streaming through a window. A video projection accompanies the lightbox to mimic solar beams coming through the panes of glass. With these works, Briard contemplates what effect it might have to simulate the sun, the most vital element of our universe. In Medieval cathedrals, stained glass windows were designed to communicate the sublime—in Briard’s hands, the most basic element of the natural world, the light of the sun, becomes a thing of wonder, akin to a spirit or a higher power. Such is the disconnect between the natural world and the average person. — excerpted from a text by Meredyth Cole and Genevieve Michaels
Briard borrows from a recent history of modernist painters and artists, most of whom were white men, who seemed to have cornered the market in western art histories on perceptual play and the interaction of shapes and colours. To produce a new way of looking, Briard inserts her work into this history by repurposing colours and shapes and pushing the project of perception further along by activating her works with new elements. Briard subvert the idea of finality, as there is always something new to see, something else to unpack, some experience that is missing and when we open to new possibilities, we open to the entire story shifting again. — excerpted from a text by Ashley McLellan, for the catalog of “Superlucent”, Monica Reyes Gallery 2022
HORIZON RGB
Full spectrum color-changing inkjet print photographs. Ongoing series.
Horizon RGB are light boxes that compare natural and artificial light in full spectrum while exploring horizon gradients.
