Surrey, BC – Surrey Art Gallery is pleased to announce the next exhibition at their offsite UrbanScreen venue. Annie Briard: Refracted Fields opens on Thursday, May 15. The artwork is on display every evening 30 minutes after sunset until midnight at Surrey Civic Plaza until July 29, 2025. Admission is free.
Refracted Fields presents a kaleidoscopic visual poem about the landscapes of British Columbia. The City Centre library façade optically spins apart to reveal rising tidewaters and meteor showers of light. Grand vistas of the Coast Mountains collide with close-up images of roadside plants. Floodplains, foothills and forests rip, fold, and burn up to reveal new views and reborn landscapes. Each natural element in Briard’s newest video work is inextricably linked to its visual components and counterparts in a poetic reflection on landscape, place, time, and the conventions of sight.
With its subtle handmade transformations and tricks, Refracted Landscapes is a subversive challenge to the high-tech visual imagery that viewers have come to expect in our digital age. Briard’s projection combines studio-based and in-the-field experiments with prisms, coloured gels, and digital and physical layering and animating to deconstruct the ways we perceive the world around us. Refracted Fields extends Briard’s ongoing practice that investigates the parallels between natural and artificial light, time, and perception, along with ecology, psychology, and neuroscience.
“Refracted Landscapes experiments with colour, light, and landscape in ways that evoke a long tradition of optical-perceptual art made about British Columbia landscapes,” says curator Jordan Strom, “yet Briard’s video projection explores human perception and the revelatory nature of the world’s ever-changing appearances at a time of unprecedented flux.”
About the Artist
Annie Briard (BFA, MFA) is a visual artist known for her practice in expanded photography and digital media. With beginnings in Montreal and now working from the Pacific Northwest, her works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, including at Royale Projects in Los Angeles (2024), Staring at the Sun at the Quebec Biennale (2022) and MKG127 in Toronto (2025); Superlucent (2022) at Monica Reyes Gallery and Within the Eclipse (2021) at the Burrard Arts Foundation in Vancouver. Briard has been artist-in-residence at High Desert Test sites in California, Wassaic Projects NY, SIM in Iceland, the Banff Centre for the Arts, among others in Europe and the US. Briard is a Lecturer in photography and media arts at Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECUAD) on the ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples including the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam). For Refracted Fields, Briard was assisted by ECUAD students Miranda Firmston (sound) and Mike Partridge (video). anniebriard.com
About Surrey Art Gallery
Founded in 1975, Surrey Art Gallery presents contemporary art by local, national, and international artists, including digital and audio art. Recognized for its award-winning programs, the Gallery engages children through to adults in ongoing conversations that affect our lives and provides opportunities to interact with artists and the artistic process. The Gallery is located at 13750 88 Avenue in Surrey on the unceded territories of the Salish Peoples, including the q̓ic̓əy̓ (Katzie), q̓ʷɑ:n̓ƛ̓ən̓ (Kwantlen), and Semiahma (Semiahmoo) nations. Surrey Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges operating funding from the City of Surrey, Province of BC through BC Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, and the Surrey Art Gallery Association.
