Photo Asa Gilmore/Courtesy the Nevada Museum of Art
The landscape of Los Angeles and the people who live there have long been central to the work of Guillermo Bert. Back in the 1990s, for a series titled “L.A. Sites,” Bert would scour downtown LA hunting for movie posters and other advertisements layered so thick that their edges curled off in slabs from the wall. Wearing workman’s gloves, Bert would rip them free and transport them back to his studio where he would strip them apart only to reassemble them into painted collages. The once-shiny pop culture images became scarred by dried adhesive, gaining a gauzy patina.
“I would keep on ripping off pieces just to kind of give it more life,” Bert said of compiling this urban bricolage. “I always disliked artwork that is so finished that you bounce out of it. I like the work that is more undone and unfinished.”
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That approach has guided his four-decade career, though it has manifested in various forms, from woven tapestries with QR codes (“Encoded Textiles”) to his latest series, “The Warriors,” which recently debuted as part of his mid-career retrospective at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, on view until February 4. (“L.A. Sites” is featured in a companion exhibition at the nearby Lilley Museum of Art.) “I think it’s very magical the way that he can create these relationships with these different layers,” said Vivian Zavataro, the exhibition’s curator. “And then you can find these threads throughout his whole oeuvre, his whole body of work, which is rare.”
The seed for “The Warriors” began during the pandemic when frontline workers were essential but unseen. “I really wanted to do an homage to all these people, the common workers,” Bert said, drawing a parallel between essential workers and the Terracotta Army sculptures that inspired his “Warriors.” A large percentage of essential workers in LA are Latinx, so Bert tapped his own rich community of friends and connections, including his carpenter, a local fireman, and environmental activist Nalleli Cobo.
“To me, she represents the muse of the young generation of Latinos, the spirit of the workforce, and the future of the workers in America,” Bert said of Cobo, who he met a few years back at The Center for the Study of Political Graphics.
Photo Asa Gilmore/Courtesy the Nevada Museum of Art
To create these 15 life-size sculptures made using 3D scanning and laser cutting, Bert tapped his technical expertise in architectural design tools that are normally used to create site elevation designs. Each 3D full-body scan was translated into digital elevation models and then physically produced using birch planks measuring an eighth of an inch, that he then assembled by hand, layer by layer.
The sculptures have a bitmap-like quality, due to their being stepped, which gives them an almost pixelated appearance of data coming onto an old-school computer. The figures are wholly recognizable but also not in sharp view. The wood, with its natural variations, takes on even richer tones from the sear of the laser and a polyurethane varnish, which Bert compared to being baptized by fire. These gradated earth tones evoke ancient geological layers and changing landscapes.
“I personally feel when you follow the surface of these sculptures and go into the layers and see it from a different perspective, you get a different feel for it,” Bert said.
As part of Bert’s vision, “The Warriors” are displayed in a mirrored gallery that amplifies their presence into infinity—essentially creating a whole army and challenging society’s blind spots. The sculptures are at once representative of the individual sitters and the stories they carry as well as something much larger. Because the room is angled, the reflections are sometimes fragmented.
“It’s not just a plain view, but like a broken-down vision with images reflected in different, weird angles. And the people that are visiting are part of that too,” Bert said.
Photo Asa Gilmore/courtesy the Nevada Museum of Art
Uplifting the voices and values of immigrants and marginalized groups has been a personal theme for Bert, who moved to Los Angeles from his native Chile some 40 years ago. But an important shift in his work took place on his first trip back home to Chile in 2010.
“I started traveling and meeting people in the different communities,” Bert recalled. “I thought, you know, their stories are so much more interesting than mine.” He hoped that sharing their stories could shift people’s thinking about immigrants from apathy to understanding.
That led to his “Encoded Textiles” series, which built upon his “Barcodes” (2006-2017) of enlarged barcodes some of which are in the colors of the US flag with words like “Democracy” or “White Lies” in place of SKU numbers. Bert found aesthetic similarities between images embedded in Indigenous woven textiles and the sharp edges of modern QR codes. He worked with Indigenous weavers from Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, and the US to create tapestries embedded with active QR codes. When scanned, these codes direct to a website featuring the stories of these weavers and their communities.
Photo Asa Gilmore/Courtesy the Nevada Museum of Art
His “Tumble Dreams” series continues the impulse of his “Encoded Textiles” and was prompted by the 2016 US presidential election, which saw a resurgence in anti-immigration rhetoric that has only intensified in the past eight years. Again, Bert wanted to combine two seemingly incongruous mediums, this time in the form of projecting advanced video mapping technology onto tumbleweeds, ubiquitous throughout the borderlands. Bert collaborated with migrants to capture their “heart wrenching” stories and embedded them onto the thatched, thorny surface of tumbleweeds.
“When they’re telling their stories projected in the tumbleweed, their faces are part of these spiny sticks. If you touch the panorama, you would get a bunch of spines and splinters in your hands. So, it’s a very rough situation. The idea was that the tumbleweeds are like the immigrants in the desert. They’d be blown away by the wind without a direction,” he said.
Photo Asa Gilmore/Courtesy the Nevada Museum of Art
At the Nevada Museum of Art, “Tumble Dreams” is installed in a black box room, with the tumbleweeds suspended from the ceiling. Zavataro, the exhibition’s curator, echoes this comparison between the tumbleweeds and the immigrants featured in the videos: one boundaryless, the other restricted by manmade borders. “The connection between immigrants crossing the border undocumented and tumbleweeds themselves tumbling throughout the desert, going with the wind as they traverse this very harsh environment, [evokes] the hardness of these folks so determined to have a better life, coming into a country that might not accept them most of the time,” she said.
Whether with posters and painting, weavings and websites, tumbleweeds and technology, or figures fabricated of plywood, Bert layers his works to tell stories and build empathy for communities that are unvalued or unseen. “If you kind of blow them away, saying, ‘They’re not my business, they’re not my stories. I don’t know anything about it,’ then that is easy to dismiss,” he said. “But when you get to understand it and you hear the stories, then you get a better sense of the real issues.”
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