Opening Reception: Terry Berlier, Resounding Desire Lines

Artist Talk and Demonstration
Thursday, Nov 9, 2017, 6 to 8 PM
Join artist Terry Berlier for a free opening reception to celebrate the new window gallery exhibit Resounding Desire Lines.
Talk and demonstration will begin at 7 PM.
While Berlier volunteered in the Peace Corps in Jamaica, she encountered the homophobic saying “two pan tops can’t meet.” This Jamaican proverb was translated to her as meaning “two vaginas can not come together.” Years later, Berlier noticed that mismatched pan lids are often abandoned and accumulate in thrift stores. She created homes for these lost pan-lids in earlier work where she coupled pan lids and mounted speakers inside them to refute the original saying. While working on that piece, Berlier found that aluminum lids resonated well and she saved them. Those lids resonate in this piece.
Her pan lid sculptures allow queerness to be heard. With this piece, Berlier invites viewers to challenge heteronormativity by creating queer sounds.
Artist Statement
I am an interdisciplinary artist working with sculpture, kinetics, interactivity and sound to focus on the environment, ideas of nonplace/place and queer practice. My work emphasizes the essential role played by history, social relations, cultural memories and environmental conditions in the creation of our identities. Using humor, I provide tools for recovering and reanimating our faltering connections with self, nature and society. Networks are not just webs of digital synapses, but they are the underlying conditions of our life in the world. The interweaving of movement and sound is a metaphor for harmonious or dissonant interactions within human communities. The work addresses’ the fragility of our ties to a natural world whose long standing rhythms are being disrupted by industry and human intervention. I use humorous metaphors for human cooperation with machines that require coordinated joint effort to operate properly.
About the Artist
“Terry Berlier makes conceptual art of unusual intelligence, humor and sensitivity to the impact of materials.”—Kenneth Baker, SF Chronicle
Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sculpture and expanded media. Her work is kinetic, interactive and/or sound based and focuses on everyday objects, the environment, ideas of nonplace/place and queer practice.
Berlier has exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally including the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, Catherine Clark Gallery, Southern Exposure, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery at Stanford University, Montalvo Arts Center, Weston Art Gallery, Babel Gallery in Norway, Richard L. Nelson Gallery, Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, Kala Art Institute Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Natural Balance in Girona Spain and FemArt Mostra D’Art De Dones in Barcelona Spain. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, the Zellerbach Foundation Berkeley, Artist in Residence at Montalvo Arts Center, Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research Fellow at Stanford University, Recology San Francisco, Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest Hungary, Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco, California Council for Humanities California Stories Fund and the Millay Colony for Artists. Her work has been reviewed in the BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle and in the book ‘Seeing Gertrude Stein’ published by University of California Press. Her work is in several collections including the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland Ohio, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley California and Bildwechsel Archive in Berlin Germany.
She received a Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art from University of California, Davis and a Bachelors of Fine Arts from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Terry Berlier is an Associate Professor and Director of the Sculpture Lab in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University where she has taught since 2007.