Terry Berlier

Published in Panhandler Issue 6

Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who works primarily with sculpture and expanded media. Her work is often kinetic, interactive and/or sound based and focuses on everyday objects, the environment, ideas of nonplace/place and queer practice. She is currently spending her sabbatical from teaching as an artist in residence at Recology San Francisco aka “the dump” where she will have an exhibition of scavenged materials in January of 2012. She will also be doing another artist in residence in Norway in June of 2012. She has exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally including the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, Richard L. Nelson Gallery in Davis CA, Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, Kala Art Institute Gallery in Berkeley, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Natural Balance in Girona Spain and FemArt Mostra D’Art De Dones in Barcelona Spain. 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 has received numerous residencies and grants including the Zellerbach Foundation Berkeley, 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, Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, California Council for Humanities California Stories Fund and the Millay Colony for Artists. 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. She currently is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.

Artist’s Statement

A commitment to remain human in an increasingly changing and hybridizing world, culture, and home is what helps me negotiate my place interpersonally and relationally to my studio practice and production as an artist. As innovations alter how we perceive and interact with the world, are we coming closer to or farther from understanding each other and the world around us? In continually mining this question I find the memory of time and history preserved in the natural environment surrounding us as a major theme in my practice. The traces and clues discovered in this investigation reveal quasi-cyclical patterns of the past and remind us at the same time to question how we might use that evidence to ethically move forward. My work seeks to dissect and map the fabrication of time to expose and manipulate our understanding of cultural and environmental histories. These are spatially configured through audience interaction with sculpture that incorporates sound, video, installation and drawings. Found materials, technologies that are both vernacular and modern, and detritus from everyday life are appropriated or subverted and humor is embedded in the material and content. When I was growing up my father’s workshop was in the room next to the toy room. The door between the two was always open and I did not distinguish any boundaries between the two—toys and tools, playing and making, girls and boys.