Virginie Barré is an artist based in Douranenez, France, whose practice includes drawing, sculpture, and installation. Culling imagery from film noir and science fiction, her meticulously rendered drawings reinterpret popular cinematic tropes. Barré exploits cultural clichés as tools for satire and humor, and in turn, explores the boundary between fiction and reality. Barré has exhibited internationally and is represented by Galerie Loevenbruck in Paris.

What initially drew you to the language of comics? How would you characterize your particular approach to the form?

VB: It came from my desire to introduce a narrative element into my work. In 2001, I was at an artist's residency in Nice in the south of France. There, at the Villa Arson, I had access to every edition of "Les Cahiers du cinema" (a well-known French cinema magazine) since its first publication. Right from the beginning, the comic framework was mixed with these cinematographic references. Then the field of references began to widen.

My approach to comics borrows its form, but doesn't always respect the rules of narrative or the continuity of characters or the story's coherence. The pretext of dreams allows me to develop fragmented or truncated scenarios.

In the comic for this series, you begin with a very familiar news story—the eruption of the Icelandic volcano—but it quickly devolves into a dreamlike sequence of images strung together by a monologue that jumps between narrators. Can you elaborate on what inspired the piece and how you went about making it?

VB: I was thinking about the power of the mind, hosted by our body, and I was thinking about the Icelandic volcano (Jules Verne's center of the earth) and how its masterful standby mode had the ability to cause such havoc on Earth. I was thinking about different influences on our lives: the things and beings... ourselves, in what proportions... and all of that in constantly moving fragility.

In this comic, fiction and reality seem to commingle and bleed into one another. Is the ambiguity of what is real and what is invented something you're interested in exploring, and to what effect?

VB: Choosing this kind of dreamlike language gives me complete freedom, regardless of genres. I feel free of all constraint in terms of meaning—anything is possible. I'm fascinated by the comic universe of Winsor McKay, who created Little Nemo, as well as that of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, where the initial premise is that of dreams.

You often incorporate cinematic references into your work. What are your favorite films, and how do you aim to transform them in your projects?

VB: I love Kubrick's "The Shining," Hitchcock's "Vertigo," Truffaut's "Small Change," "Blow-Up" by Antonioni, "Fargo" from the Cohen brothers, "Existenz" by Cronenberg, "Mulholland Drive" by Lynch, Brian de Palma's "Blow Out," Godard's "Pierrot le fou," "Les biches" by Chabrol, and many others... my interest isn't specialized in one cinema genre, quite the contrary!

Most of the time, I extract fragments from a movie or from documents related to the filming of a movie, and I mix them with other references that sometimes are completely unrelated (drawing some lush vegetation behind the actors of "Blow-Up" for example). I imagine a new story and create a particular atmosphere so that each new piece of the puzzle can take its place.

Your works span from room-filling, site-specific installations to single drawn images—how do you select the media and scale for a particular project?

VB: Using installations composed of mannequins allows me to think of an atmosphere or an environment as if we were entering into an image rather like Mia Farrow in "The Purple Rose of Cairo," if you see what I mean? That's the desire that's pushing me. When I play around with scale it allows me to increase the strangeness of the character. A man might have the size of a child; an old shaman could be twice as big as us. This provokes a rupture, or a displacement of our understanding of a form, and it facilitates escape towards the imaginary or the phantasmagorical.

This phenomenon reappears in my drawings inspired by comics and the "Ligne Claire" authors (Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, David B.). I'm aware that the imagination that I've developed here probably has strong ties with childhood through Russian and gipsy stories, and more classical tales that were read to me as a child—stories where everyone spends their time being transformed or disappearing!

There is a playful, experimental "cut-up" quality to your narratives and installations, where various imagery and pop culture tropes are juxtaposed, and humor and horror jut up against one another at nearly every turn. How do you characterize the way you select and mix different material in your work?

VB: I think it's my way of playing down death and conflict, which both recur in my work—you could even say my work is haunted by them. Being playful and letting different families of shapes, objects, and imagery rub up against each other when they should never really have come in contact, this is a means for me of drawing in the spectator—being in "Fun and Fancy Free" (Disney), but at the same time, only if there's a werewolf on the prowl.

What will you be working on next?

VB: I'm working on several new installations, one of which represents female spirits. So I'm working on recreating the postures, costumes, and accessories of characters in a state of trance. It's for an exhibition in southwest France in an old castle at Taurines, on July 9th (I'm invited there by an art center called Les Abattoirs—as in a slaughterhouse!) I'm also working on some jewelry and a very large drawing installation.

What are the issues facing us today that you're most interested in, concerned about, or motivated by as an artist? What should we be paying attention to?

VB: For many years I've been preoccupied by the fact that we're not eternal, and the interesting thing is that this obsession is evolving, it's constantly changing and, by extension, that modifies my work too. Jodorowsky is very important to me, for example—he's a crazy and witty being and really inspires me.

The fact of being a woman artist and a mother forces me to see our combat as a vast one, and to see that enormous vigilance is needed so that women, and women artists, a fortiori, can occupy their true place.