Morgan Barnard

Santa Fe based artist Morgan Barnard creates experimental, immersive works that have been featured in museums, galleries, festivals, and public spaces. His works incorporate animation, video, dynamic lighting, sound, rapid prototyping, and generative, design into projections, lighting installations, screen based works and physical media. With a background in fine art, education, filmmaking, music, and interactive design, Barnard brings a unique, multidisciplinary sensibility to his work. His artistic practice explores the emergent nature of reality and perception by combining systems from the natural world and from generative media. These connected systems provide and experimental platform to initiate interactive experiences and performance based pieces. The contrast between structure and abstraction creates a space where the viewer becomes a participant through their interaction; a state of improvisational immediacy. 

Barnard's first solo show was at Pie Projects in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It featured his immersive projection installation Light State, an audio-reactive projection and LED sculpture entitled Cellular, and Barnard's explorations in plotter drawings, which combine watercolor painting and generative drawings. His work with Pie Projects continued in 2022 with a site-specific window installation Light Between, a light art piece that provides viewers with a moment of meditation and reverie. His public art projects include the lighting project Tilikum Light in Portland, Oregon that uses data from the Willamette River to control dynamic lighting on the Tilikum Crossing bridge and Sublimare at the San Diego airport where a dynamic lighting installation is controlled using real-time data from a wave buoy off the coast of California. His performance pieces include Inter-Reactions, a generative audio/visual piece featured as a live stream during the Currents New Media Festival in 2021. He looks forward to continuing to explore the relationship between data, light, and experience.