Cindy Bernard "Silent Key"
Tracy Williams Ltd.
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Tracy Williams, Ltd. presents Silent Key, an exhibition of photographs and pigment prints by Los Angeles-based artist, Cindy Bernard. In Bernard’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, the artist utilizes the concept of sound as subject, via a series of pigment prints inspired by her grandfather Bill Adams’ experience as a ham radio operator from 1923 until his death in 1999, when he became a “silent key.”
The series Silent Key maps the communications which occurred between fellow ham radio operators located throughout distant regions of the world, spanning vast political divides and shifts in territorial alliances. Deleted Entities 1925-1996 forms part of this series and is derived from Bill Adams’ archive of 6,000 QSL cards spanning his 76 years working as a radio operator. Within the world of amateur radio operators, QSL cards functioned as a form of identification, and were exchanged to verify two-way contact between hams. Each card contains the ham’s call sign, location and details of communication. Because much of amateur radio is in Morse code, hams use the QSL cards to express their personality and provide information about the region in which they live—resulting in a diverse visual array of graphic, image and vernacular typography representing virtually every country in the world.
Deleted Entities 1925-1996 consists of scans of these cards from hams operating in political entities that no longer exist: the USSR, Nazi Germany, Korea and China during Japanese occupation and colonial Africa, among others. When sorted by continent and date, the result is a spatial and durational mapping consisting of 115 pieces in an array spanning 6 feet high by 55 feet long. This representational archive is inevitably incomplete—these natural gaps in country and year cause the grid to resemble a musical score, or perhaps even the rhythm of Morse code.
Silent Key also includes documentation of the W6BA “antenna farm” located at Twentynine Palms, California; the same transducers that her grandfather, operating first as W6ANN and later as W6BA, relied on to transmit his signal across the world. Additionally, Silent Key consists of 15 Interstitial Beauties, based on the French postcards also discovered in the QSL archive; and Portraits, a series of images of ham radio operators derived from self-portraits found on QSL cards.
[Image: Cindy Bernard "Silent Key: Portraits VP4TF, C.N.P. Weatherhead Port-Of-Spain, Trinidad 1947 Active / Silent Key, Unknown" (2008) Pigment print, 24 x 18.5 in]
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Schedule
from September 12, 2008 to October 25, 2008