Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, kinetic art, sound, installation
Website: terryberlier.com
Terry Berlier was born in 1972 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and lives and works in the Stanford/Palo Alto area of the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BFA from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio in 1994, spent two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica (1992–1995), and received her MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Davis in 2003. She has been an Associate Professor and Director of the Sculpture Lab in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University since 2007. She has served on the advisory board of Recology San Francisco’s Artist-in-Residence Program since 2013, following her own residency there in 2011–12.
Her work has been reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Kenneth Baker, in BBC News Magazine, and in Art in America. It is published in Seeing Gertrude Stein (UC Press, 2011) by Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer and in Slant Step Book: The Mysterious Object and the Artworks It Inspired (2019). Her work is in the collections of the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland, the Bildwechsel Archive in Berlin, and the University of Arizona. Her awards include the Zellerbach Foundation Commission, the Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship (2011), a Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research Fellowship at Stanford (2011–12), residencies at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (2008–09), the Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest (2010), Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder (LKV) in Trondheim, Norway (2012), and Montalvo Arts Center (2014).
Berlier makes kinetic sculpture, sound installation, and expanded media works that investigate the evolution of human interaction with queerness and ecologies. Her sculptures — described by Kenneth Baker as “conceptual art of unusual intelligence, humor and sensitivity to the impact of materials” — are built from reclaimed, salvaged, and obsolete objects, transforming consumer detritus into metaphors for environmental decline, technological obsession, and social collapse. Arduino-controlled motor and pulley systems, twenty-four cyanotype prints arranged in a circle, 242 telephone speakers — one for each country and territory in the world — wired together in endless loops: her works have the character of cumbersome, mildly comical contraptions whose absurdity conceals political urgency. A central recurring interest is queer ecology: the ways that non-normative bodies and non-normative environments illuminate each other. Her collaborative practice extends to composers, engineers, architects, and sound artists, with whom she develops works that weave music, sculpture, and LGBTQ+ themes into shared experiences.
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