The east wall of Surrey’s City Centre public library building is now lit nightly with Refracted Fields digital art by Annie Briard, who re-imagines B.C. landscapes “through visual sleights of hand.”
The outdoor art exhibit opened Thursday (May 15) at the UrbanScreen venue, reopened in December at Surrey Civic Plaza (10350 University Drive), in a $1-million move from 107A Avenue.
For the next couple of months, until July 29, Refracted Fields will be displayed 30 minutes after sunset until midnight — and it’s free to see from the public plaza, of course.
Briard’s work, commissioned by Surrey Art Gallery for UrbanScreen, involves seven-projector video mapping with sound on a six-minute, 30-second loop, according to the visual artist’s website, where photos are posted.
Refracted Fields combines “studio-based and in-the-field experiments with prisms, coloured gels, and physical layering to deconstruct the ways we perceive the world around us,” with “contrasting images of sublime and everyday vistas.”
The 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,” raves a news release posted on city hall’s website.
“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.”
Work to install UrbanScreen’s digital-art projection system at Civic Plaza was projected to cost just over $1 million, mostly with federal funding, according to a report before Surrey council in February 2024.
After 12 years of operation at Chuck Bailey Recreation Centre, UrbanScreen was decommissioned in May 2022 due to expansion plans at the rec facility. The 30-metre-wide “screen” was obscured by some doors and windows, a similar look at Surrey Civic Plaza.
Programmed by Surrey Art Gallery, UrbanScreen aims to showcase “innovative, site-specific, digital art made by artists from around the Lower Mainland and further afield.” More details are posted on surrey.ca/urbanscreen.
Once billed as “Canada’s largest art-dedicated outdoor screen,” UrbanScreen was subject of the 2020 book Art After Dark, marking its 10th anniversary.
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