Annette Barbier

Annette Barbier (September 29, 1950 – June 5, 2017) was a Chicago-based artist, who worked with video art, net art, installation art, interactive performance, and emerging and experimental technologies since the 1970s. Themes in her work address, "issues of home, defined locally as domesticity and more broadly as the ways in which we relate to our environment." An early work, "Home Invasion [1995]," incorporating critical dialogue and audio is accessible on Leonardo. "Domestic space—formerly inviolable—is increasingly disrupted by electronic communication of all sorts, including radio, TV, email and the telephone."

Contents

• Annette Barbier on Brushwood Center
• Professional experience
• Education
• Art collaborations
• Select art exhibitions
• Select permanent collections
• Awards
• Grants
• Reviews
• Publications
• References

Driven by life experiences Barbier's perspective on home evolved over the years. At one point Barbier dropped out of college to spend a year in France, which was formative in making issues of home, culture and identity central to her work. Years later, a Fulbright lectureship in India with her 3-year-old daughter confirmed the importance of travel in questioning one's conceptions about the world. Barbier once lived outside the city with her family on the edge of a Cook County forest preserve. This close connection to the natural environment, frequently spotting coyote, hawks, waterfowl, songbirds, and deer made a lasting impression. Over time her focus has moved from an emphasis on the personal to a consideration of the global, looking at ways in which the home has come to be defined more broadly as populations shift, and as our interdependence becomes increasingly clear.

Currently Barbier re-investigates the ways in which embodiment can facilitate the expression of an idea calling into question our relationship to the natural world using technology as a metaphor for loss. Loss of material through the destructive process of laser engraving, which removes material through burning, as compared to loss of habitat, loss of entire species, and loss of diversity in our native plants and animals Barbier's current artwork addressing ideas of home and place, in contrast to natural worlds and systems "poetically makes visible a small intersection in civilization that is incredibly complex, and broken" and emphasizes "vision as metaphor."