8F x 16F x 2F
Sublimation print on ¼” aluminium panel, wood base
Pillar Mountain is an expanded photography work exploring paradigms of landscape imagery by way of an affective, embodied experience. Skilled in optical illusion, the artist plays with trompe l’oeil devices to question the claims made by visual perception about our natural surroundings.
Through an installation of 24 vertical metal strips which have been printed on, the artist slices up a photograph of Rockies’ Mount Rundle, which is then reorganized to deconstruct the image while keeping a plausible cloud line. The visual effect of the work is thus contradictory. From a small distance, looking at the whole and focusing on the skyline, the recomposed mountainscape feels harmonious and evocative of the sublime. Yet, as the viewer approaches and becomes dwarfed by the work, the details of the disjointed, reorganized landscape can feel vertiginous and destabilizing, much like the experience of climbing a mountain or getting lost in the forest.
To create her work, Briard regularly undertakes long haul hikes in the back country in search of affective spaces, where humans can feel insignificant. Pillar Mountain was created from a photograph she captured while on a hike from her studio at the Banff Centre during an artist residency.
Produced with support from the British Columbia Art Council.
Photo credit: Scott Massey
Photo series with installation “lenses”: inkjet prints from 35mm slides, aluminium, acrylic, wood.
Rooted in conceptual photography, analog technologies and Light and Space, this series, Through the Walls of Gold, asks us to reconsider the workings of visual perception and how it shapes our surrounding existence. By complicating what is seen, Briard constructs dreamlike landscapes that transcend the appearance of the physical world into imaginative realms while reflecting back visual phenomenology.
Deeply affected by the unique light qualities of California’s High Desert, she has been making regular trips to this environment over the past decade. Briard forges an ethereal atmosphere that captures the area’s sublime allure, once depicted by visionaries like Agnes Pelton, a member of the Transcendental Painting Group. The open terrain’s natural, muted beauty is optically distorted and reimagined through an acidic palette and otherworldly perspective.
Her photographs are created using handmade lenses formed from discarded military prisms to deconstruct the visible spectrum into its recalibrated colors. Minimalist translucent “lenses”, referencing Larry Bell, Peter Alexander or Alex Israel, introduce an interactive experience transforming each image as the viewer moves around the gallery.
When asked to contextualize these works, the artist states “my practice uses the landscape genre as a foil through which to discuss issues in vision psychology, neuroscience and existential philosophy.”
Briard reminds us that seeing is a process that presents a version of reality rather than an accurate reproduction and that perception is constantly evolving, shaped by context and individual experience.
— Views and text from Royale Projects, Los Angeles
Six 12-foot photographic columns
Infinite Retreat invites viewers to navigate towering, 12-foot-tall sculptures that merge photography and installation, creating an immersive experience that challenges the way we perceive reality. The work invites visitors to engage with their own interpretations of the environment, questioning how visual perception influences our understanding of the world and our relationship to the land. Through this interactive installation, Briard explores the complexities of perception, highlighting how our sensory experiences inform the way we interpret nature and the spaces we inhabit.
Briard’s practice critically addresses the historical baggage that landscapes carry within art and photography, unpacking their associations with idealization, colonialism, and propaganda. Through her photographic lens, she confronts the misperceptions that distort our understanding of the world, particularly in how light and visual cues influence how we perceive the natural environment. Ultimately, Infinite Retreat advocates for a more empathetic, thoughtful approach to how we relate to the world and each other, encouraging a deeper understanding of the complexities of human-environment interactions.
— Text by Christine May, Curator, Kelowna Art Gallery, 2025.
Public art lightbox commissioned by MKG127 gallery (Toronto) 2024-26. “The Light of Six Moons” refers back to an expanded photography installation made by the artist (The Light of Two Thousand Moons) through which thousands of color combinations were created by chance, through the layering of 240 35mm slides shot by the artist. Each image was of the clear, daylit sky as viewed through cinema lighting gels (transparent, tinted material used to create lighting effects in film). Working with seven colors, Briard mixed and layered them to create countless variations and tones, a nod to the fact that only three colours combine to create the limitless spectrum of hues visible to the human eye. Briard asks us to consider how our own perception could be seen to act as another gel, or filter, shading our vision and altering reality. The cyclical projections from the installation also evokes the stages of the moon, itself a blank canvas coloured by human subjectivity. Fittingly, while we perceive the moon to be white, it shifts in colour depending on the circumstances through which we perceive it.
For Briard, this lightbox project felt like an apt sign for a gallery which expands our perception, while the range of colors is intended to honor all of the artworks which will be shown in the space during its run. Commissioned by MKG127 Gallery, Toronto, 2024-26.
Ongoing series. Inkjet prints mounted to aluminium, sizes variable. / Série continue. Impressions à jet-d’encre montées sur panneaux d’aluminium, dimensions variables.
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Three slide projectors blend, at random, slides from my father’s archive from when he was travelling across Canada 45 years ago working on the railway, and my own slides from current visits to the same locations in the Rockies and the Canadian and US Western coast. The newly formed images are composed by chance and then photographed, offering prescient insights into our future lands as they transform from the shifting climate.
Ongoing series. Inkjet print on Epson lustre paper, 34” x 34” framed in colored maple / Série continue. Impressions à jet-d’encre sur papier Epson lustré, 34 po x 34 po.
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Three slide projectors blend, at random, slides from my father’s archive from when he was travelling across Canada 45 years ago working on the railway, and my own slides from current visits to the same locations in the Rockies and the Canadian and US Western coast. The newly formed images are composed by chance and then photographed, offering prescient insights into our future lands as they transform from the shifting climate.
"Opérant une sédimentation de mémoires et des espaces-temps, Annie Briard présente une série de paysages couleur ; In Possible Lands (2020) questionne la délimitation intangible entre le réel et l’imaginaire par des images composites (prises à des moments différents, mais dans le même espace). L’artiste revisite le patrimoine photographique de son père, constitué principalement de paysages canadiens des années 1980, en y superposant ses propres clichés des mêmes lieux. Compression d’empreintes paysagères apparemment majestueuses, gardant pourtant trace d’une nette altération provoquée par l’action humaine."
-- Elizabeth Recurt, Vie des Arts
34” x 34” inkjet on lustre paper, framed in magenta.
inkjet on lustre paper 34” x 34”
inkjet on lustre paper 34” x 34”
Inkjet prints on silk, 50” x 50”, view at Deluge Contemporary Gallery, Victoria.
monumental mural double-sided translucent vinyl, commission for Art Souterrain, Place Victoria, Montreal.
Full spectrum color-changing inkjet print photographs. Ongoing series. / Impressions photographiques à jet d’encre changeant de couleur. Série continue.
Horizon RGB are light boxes that compare natural and artificial light in full spectrum while exploring horizon gradients.
“Briard’s Horizon RGB is a Rothkoesque inkjet landscape set in a colour-changing light box that presents the ways in which our experience of light affects our perception of the environment” - Maya Wilson-Sanchez, Canadian Art magazine
"Annie's work explores what we perceive as real while drawing a parallel between the artificial and natural. Her works often includes technology and optical illusion elements much like a magician who forces us to rethink what is that we have in front of us."
- Monica Reyes, Director/Curator, Monica Reyes Gallery
Video demo of light cycle here
Series of 9 inkjet prints on rag paper / série de 9 impressions à jet d’encre sur papier d’aquarelle
“The landscape as an artform is rife with heavy baggage accumulated over centuries. As a media artist and photographer, I regularly make use of landscapes in order to talk about our misperception of the world around us, to question the function of visual perception and light, and also to discuss humanity’s impact on the environment. Through regular road trips and long-haul backpacking hikes, I immerse myself in the land in order to spark inspiration for new projects. There is a problematic nature to landscape photography (and painting) however, upon which Landscapes and Propaganda reflects.”
— excerpted from Language and Propaganda, ed. The Perceiving Eye, 2020.
This series was shot on residency at SIM in Reykjavik, Iceland, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.
inkjet print on backlit film, custom color-changing, 16" x 16" x 2.5", 2019
Alchemy of Waves are color-changing light boxes that slowly shift landscape photographs and their light rays through the full color spectrum, confronting us with the ways in which our fragile perception of light transforms our experience of the world around us.
L’alchimie des ondes sont des boîtes lumineuses changeant de couleur et menant des paysages photographiques à travers le spectre chromatique complet. Par l’entremise de ces œuvres, nous sommes mis en confrontation avec la fragilité de notre perception de la lumière et de la façon dont celle-ci transforme notre expérience du monde.
Inkjet on metallic paper / Impressions à jet-d’encre sur papier métallique.
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In the not so distant past, there was a beautifully poetic vision theory that proclaimed the eye to contain a small crystal, carefully shaping the light so that it may bring us illumination.
Much is still left to our imagination when determining whether what we see is actually there. Like emitters, our eyes seem to create parts of what we perceive; one need only look for the blind spots in the centre of their sightline or the colourful afterimages orchestrated by the brain. Much like crystals indeed, our eyes mediate light and what we see.
The series Paracosms was initiated during a residency on the southern coast of Spain.
:: Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts
Digital C-print. Impression numérique chromogène.
28” x 28” / 71 cm x 71 cm Series of 3D anaglyph prints.
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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.
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 the eyes focus on the geometric symbols pointing to where the construct breaks down. An image can be perceived in many ways.
Series of inkjet prints on metallic paper. Série d'impressions à jet d'encre sur papier métallique. 2015-16
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Stranger Memories questions the phenomenological and neurological processes behind memory, the attempts to capture our memories, and our inability to accurately share them.
Formed through technical experimentation across film and digital cameras, the series begins with old 16mm film footage of strangers’ home movies which have been digitized to video. Home movies may be the closest tangible representation of memory we have. Their movement and ephemerality share similarities with how we encounter memories in our mind’s eye. The moment one frame has passed and moved onto the next, what we have seen in turn becomes part of our memory, which we must rely upon in order to follow - to create - the narrative. Of all the home movies viewed in researching this project, it was found that all such captured memories are uncannily similar, falling into one of only a dozen or so categories. A stranger’s memories at times seem indistinguishable from mine.
Using a long exposure, I photograph moments of these time-based representations of memories to present them in a single image. The time span contained within each image is of one minute. The resulting print is eerie and nostalgic; dark, blurred vision. Like that of remembrance, these images defy solid gaze. The still rivalling movement becomes an incoherent narrative producing affect instead of answers. It may, however, be memory’s most accurate representation.
Inkjet on 190lbs rag paper, series of 18, edition of 3, 2013.
