Brie Trenerry
 
Brie Trenerry lives and works in Melbourne. She uses video and digital media to create immersive, multi-channel moving image installations that reflect her current enquiry into how altered states of consciousness can generate an expanded cinema.
 
Trenerry completed a Master’s degree in Fine Art at RMIT in 2002 and is currently a PhD candidate in Screen Cultures at RMIT. She co-founded Moonlight Cinema Adelaide in 1995 and Kings ARI in 2003, and has taught video production and post-production at VCA, VUT, PSC and RMIT since 2003.
 
Her gallery and festival exhibits include a major solo exhibition at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation (AEAF) Adelaide in November 2015, and solo and group shows in Melbourne, Sydney, Santiago, Perth, Berlin, London and New York. Exhibitions forthcoming in 2016 include Eden Park (in collaboration with Kieran Boland) at MARS Gallery, where Trenerry also curates the video black box.
 
Brie Trenerry
‘Total Field’
2015. Multi channel video, 7:54 minutes.
 
Trenerry’s particular arena of enquiry centres on a technique known as the Ganzfeld Effect, which translates from German as ‘complete field’. This is a psychology experiment in which a subject deprived of both audio and visual stimulus is said to involuntarily experience otherworldly visions, and provides the framework for Trenerry to explore her own responses, as well as the minds of others.
 
Rather than opting for a singular narrative in ‘Total Field’, Trenerry’s staging is a five-screen installation in which interlinked narratives unfold—a well dressed couple in a remote country estate placing the curious translucent goggles over their lids; a research facility where compliant subjects are also wearing the goggles. Though the setting is contemporary it is an age-old cult we stumble upon, a yearning for altered states of consciousness.
 
- Damian Smith, Havana Cuba, 2015.