ICUL CTION C o n t e m p o r a r y
A r t
Annie Briard
R e v i e w
Special Issue
they perceive colors that aren’t actually there. It also draws from imagination and visualization activities that we often begin as children, like staring up at the clouds, or daydreaming while looking out at the horizon, for example. As well, the installation invites a dialectic viewing, in the sense that vision is doubled up or recursed by letting the viewer act as a voyeur of others’ experience. The work was first exhibited in Montreal at Joyce Yahouda Gallery in the spring of 2016. In that space, the viewer could see the installation from the hallway outside the gallery. Faced with a large “sun” or colored circle seemingly floating on a bright white screen, they would also see viewers sitting in reclining patio chairs, engulfed in an otherwise dark space. There was a vibratoraly palpable soundscape which could be described as deep machinic-like pulsations, generally tuned out by the brain after some time and fading into the background. The visuals use the effect of afterimages and chimeric colors to make the viewer see impossible colors; colors that cannot exist in reality. As the colorful suns fade in and out one after another, slowly moving through the visible spectrum, the viewer’s retina becomes hypersaturated with colored light and the brain perceives its opposite. In effect, the viewer is hallucinating colors while engaged in the meditative installation. The accompanying soundtrack is rooted in sound perception theories that claim that the visible field can be triggered and influenced by certain sound frequencies. It’s a piece that must be experienced in order to be affective in its commentary on how we perceive reality, but it
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