HD video projection with surround sound, acrylic form, LED lighting. Projection vidéo HD avec son surround, forme acrylique et lumières LED. 

Staring at the Sun calls up the old adage, inviting viewers to risk blindness by prolonging their gaze. In a dark room, an enigmatic projection appears on a wall in front of two chairs. As the dome-shaped projection moves through the chromatic spectrum of visible light, the device triggers an unexpectedly complex psycho-emotional phenomenon. The installation is supported by low-frequency ambient audio, which Briard has specifically designed to arouse somatic responses, using a frequency discovered by NASA that is often associated with paranormal apparitions because it causes the iris to vibrate, potentially provoking visual hallucinations. Contributing to the immersive experience is a second sound reverberating in the space, this one based on the theta rhythm, which is used in neurological research to activate organic visual functions. The device produces lingering images, illusions of movement and chimeric colours in the spectators’ minds. Briard blurs the line between the tangible and the imaginary, drawing our attention to the conjectural instability of perception.

:: Supported by the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts

Fixer le Soleil (Staring at the Sun) est un projet d’installation vidéo qui propose au spectateur de s’immiscer dans des questionnements sur la nature de la réalité de manière physique et contemplative. Alors que la règle générale déconseille fortement de fixer le soleil sous peine de cécité, Annie Briard nous invite plutôt à contourner cet adage et à poursuivre le regard de manière indéfinie. Dès lors, ce soleil fabriqué sur lequel sont projetées des couleurs en alternance entraîne l’oeil vers des phénomènes illusoires; ce premier semble se mouvoir et présente soudain des couleurs chimériques et des images rémanentes qui y étaient initialement absentes. Ces apparitions sont d’autant plus exhortées par l’ambiance sonore qui résonne dans l’espace. Développée à partir de sons employés en recherche neurologique — et associée par le fait même aux apparitions paranormales —, la trame active les fonctions organiques de la visualisation et entraîne une vibration de l’iris et, en conséquence, des hallucinations visuelles. Combinés, ces deux éléments créent une expérience immersive où nos acquis visuels deviennent incertains, et où le réel s’engage dans un combat d’ambiguïté avec l’illusion.

Custom full spectrum color-changing lightbox, USB plug / boîte de lumière fait main plein spectre avec couleurs changeantes, adaptateur USB.

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

:: funded by the British Columbia Arts Council and the Burrard Arts Foundation

3 Kodak Ektagraphic III slide projectors, syncopated automatic settings, 240 35mm color slides, grey metallic plinths. 3 projecteurs à diapositives, 240 diapositives 35mm couleur, 3 socles gris métalliques.

Media installation with video, sound, prisms, 4 HD projectors / Installation médiatique avec vidéo, son, prismes et 4 projecteurs HD.

Second Sight reflects on the problematics of perception by taking the viewer on a road trip through the high desert, where the seen eventually breaks apart and the limits between physical reality, head trips and visions from beyond become blurred. Joshua Tree is seen through disused military optics or prisms, responding to an ancient theory claiming that we see the world as a result of minuscule crystals within our eyes. As military optics frame perspectives towards specific ends, so too might the eye and its crystalline components. The exhibition presents a video installation alongside sculptural holograms and sound.

Read Whitehot Magazine’s review:
In the much-discussed opening to Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard presents a reading of the Borges cartography fable, which concludes with “The desert of the real itself” . Briard plays on the punned ending: both a departure from the real and the only landscape that might host shreds of metaphysical beauty. Each waving, hazy Joshua tree demands a different attention dispersed between separated frames. Through cracked windows or torn sails on a road trip in the hot, high desert, the viewer begins their journey in seeing the natural world for what it is and isn’t. The exhibition leaves the lingering sensation of a psychedelic trip: with some feeling and few words. “Second Sight” briefly displaces the viewer from an uber-urban environment to one that is ancient and altered, natural and ephemeral, “no longer … of the Empire, but our own”  — Cori Hutchinson

:: Premiered in New York City at AC Institute in 2019 with support from the British Columbia Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.

6K video and soundscape, projection mapped on the Vancouver Art Gallery. Vidéo couleur 6K et son, projetée sur la facade du Vancouver Art Gallery. 10:00 mins. 2017.

"Visual Scales" is a video mapping project by Annie Briard which was commissioned by the Burrard Arts Foundation and the Vancouver Art Gallery for Facade Festival.

- Read an interview about this project

Public Art commission for Evergreen Art Gallery, BC, 2020. Curated by Katherine Dennis.

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In Possible Lands 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.

On repeated long-haul hikes across Western Canada and the United States, the artist has been documenting a rapidly changing environment where, trip to trip, the evidence of climate change has become impossible to overlook. Briard was struck by the connections she saw between these photographs and an archive of slides her father took years earlier, as he traveled from Quebec to British Columbia while studying geology. Each image of In Possible Lands compresses the time gap between these two sources. By looking at the changing landscape, the artist meditates on these visible as well as unseen human impacts. The resulting photographic works offer us a medium to see into the future, asking: How do we read the past and understand the present to make predictions about what is to come?

Due to the current global health crisis, many people have been forced to slow down and stay close to home. As a result, our land use, among myriad other things, has changed swiftly. In only one short month, we are already seeing (temporary?) measurable reductions in air pollution. Our relationship to landscapes nearby—accessible through daily walks around parks such as this one—as well as to faraway places, now visible only through digital technology, have been dramatically altered in a way so few people foresaw. In this stark reality, Briard’s artwork resonates as a reminder that the environment we too easily take for granted can be viewed anew.

— Text by Katherine Dennis

Live view DSLR, LED projector, acrylic and wood plinth, found door. DSLR mode live view, projecteur LED, socle de acrylique et bois, porte trouvée. 

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"The Fabric of Your Reflection reconfigures an image of an object onto the same object in space, creating multiple membranes of film, time, and space. Overlapping and deconstructing the virtual and the real enhances ones awareness of shifting realities and perception through experimentation, drawing the viewer into a psychedelic unknown. The resulting moving-image-object becomes an existential exploration of the infinite void: a saturated, sensual, wondrous encounter that offers boundless potential."

-- Excerpted from the curatorial text 'Spectral Transmissions' by Kristina Fiedrich

:: Supported by the BC Arts Council

Interactive moving image installation: 3:14 minute video loop, pure data patcher, mac mini, projector. 2012

Perceptual Moment #8 is an interactive installation using Pure Data and cameras as sensors. Considering Gilles Deleuze's writings on the moving image and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, I examine how the embodied viewing experience of digital moving-images compares to visual perception of the physical world to deconstruct ideologies delineating conscious experience from the imaginary. The viewers’ bodies are tracked within the gallery via webcam, and the sensorial data is transmitted back to the computer. If the viewer is standing still in order to view the video, the image slowly turns to generated “white noise.” White noise and the imaginary imagery it evokes can be situated as a device by which to investigate the eye’s relationship to consciousness. In certain flicker rates, as those controllable through generation, white noise has the capacity to bring the viewer’s own mental imagery to their line of sight, superimposed with reality. In order to fully access the video, the viewer must move in the gallery space, making the act of viewing more purposeful; subjectivity more tangible.

Video installation: LED monitor, black velvet curtains. Installation vidéo: écran LED et rideaux de velours noir.
1920 x 1080

Although afterimages (or the impressions retained by the retina after exposure to light) form the basis for current theories of vision, this phenomenon still contains many unknowns. As far back as Goethe’s research on color perception, afterimages were seen as a crucial problem of visual perception: they provide undeniable proof of a deeply subjective experience of vision. To this day, they can be seen as key existentialist phenomena evidencing that reality, or the world we physically perceive, is not and can never be objective. With the work Afterimages, I set out to discover whether it would be possible to share our subjective experience of vision. Czech physician and biologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje attempted this in the early 1800s with drawing, but only through digital media and moving image can this interior vision be represented in an experiential way that comes close to how we see afterimages.

This work, created through blind drawings that are then animated, offer a record of my own afterimages. The viewer is offered the possibility to embody them as their own retinas retain the imagistic reproductions. In this way, the work provides a deep phenomenological experience where the viewer and artist share a subjective embodied experience of vision. Paradigms perhaps most important today with the advent of believable, simulated worlds, come into question: what are the eyes really perceiving, what is actually there?

Slide projection installation with anaglyph slides and glasses. Also available as a viewmaster and reel. Installation de diapositives stéréoscopique. 2014

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This installation reveals scenes constructed from photographs of the artist's 2013 journey across the North American West coast. The images' 3-dimensionality offers an immersive or hyperreal viewpoint, while concurrently pointing to zones of impossibility. Though the anaglyph glasses offer an invitation to interaction, the viewer's vantagepoint is beholden to the apparatus which changes images at its own randomized speed. The act of looking is complicated by rapid impressions of information and significant pauses or gaps of bright light, recalling the impossibility of an unmediated view of reality through fallible senses and modes of interpretation.

Moving image loop, projector, wood and velvet structure. Image en movement bouclée, projecteur, structure de bois et de tissus de velours. 2013.

The series Perceptual Moments explores and complicates perception, its associated mental phenomena, and seeks to uncover how vision relates to the construct of the world around us.

The works are displayed both as a series in individually framed monitors or independently on monitors or projections.

Paracosmic Lands is a public art commission by Capture Photography Festival and the City of Richmond Public Art. It consists of a series of four backlit panels installed at the Aberdeen skytrain station No.3 Road Art Column until June 2017.

The commission Paracosmic Lands is created using a photographic approach the artist developed during a residency on the Costa de la Luz in Spain. Using prisms and handmade lenses to mimic the idea of a crystalline vision, the resulting photographs deconstruct and combine elements populating the visible landscape. Paracosmic Lands, through its mysterious prismatic and illuminated images, invite passersby to consider how we understand the world that surrounds us and how it can never be fixed; it is in constant growth and transformation.

- Read a review of this body of work by Sunshine Frère

:: Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts

Public art, 12 x 5' x 7' photographic panels, commissioned by the New Westminster Museum + the City of New Westminster, 2017.

Using portable video projectors, the artist has been projecting images of temporary homes sourced through social media calls around the City of New Westminster, which she then photographs. Process-based, the final outcome of this work is determined by the artist’s encounters with space. Presented as a large-scale photographic artwork in The Brewery District in New Westminster, the work seeks to engage with discussions about our relationship to our environment, land ownership, and varied conceptions of shelter.

- Read an interview about this project

::This project was commissioned by the New Westminster Museum + the City of New Westminster with support from the Government of Canada.

Public art: billboard with optional 3D anaglyph glasses. Art public: panneau d'affichage avec lunettes 3D optionnelles. 20' x 10' / 6m x 3m. 2015

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“Any Day Now” is an in-situ photographic installation presented as a public art billboard. Seeking to cause a momentary break in a passerby’s visual experience, the work uses recursive frames within frames, creating a spacial tunnelling effect. The French name for this is “mise en abyme”; translated literally to “put into the void.” By decontextualizing what the viewer expects of billboards, using the optical recursive void, and offering a stereoscopic 3D viewing potential, “Any Day Now” underlines connections between visual attention, wonder, and possibility. 

:: This project was curated and produced by Back Gallery Project in collaboration with Pattison Art in Transit and presented for Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver. Photo: Jenny Cronin