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Feb 6 – Mar 6, 2027
Newzones is excited to present a solo exhibition by Canadian artist Annie Briard (BFA, MFA) who is known for her practice in expanded photography and media art. With beginnings in Montreal and now working from the Pacific North-West, her works connect aesthetics and concerns within photo conceptualism, affect theory and the light and space movement rooted in California. Through moving images, light and media installations, expanded and print photography, Briard challenges how we make sense of the world and of each other through visual perception, emphasizing paradigms across the fields of ecology, psychology and neuroscience. Her first solo exhibition with Newzones will explore Briard's expanded photography practice, including the installation "Pillar Mountain" 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. Briard’s works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Royale Projects in Los Angeles (2024; 2025), Untitled Art Fair in Miami and MKG127 in Toronto (2025), the Quebec Biennale (2022), Union Gallery at Queen’s University (2021), AC Institute in New York (2019), and Joyce Yahouda Gallery in Montréal (2016; 2014), among others. Other presentations have included the Three Shadows Photography Centre (Beijing), Lincoln Film Centre (New York), Matadero Madrid, Switzerland Architecture Museum (Basel). In 2026, her work will be the object of a solo exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Artworks