Cindy Bernard is known for photographs and projections that explore the relationship between cinema, memory, and landscape including the widely exhibited series “Ask the Dust.” She has received numerous grants including Anonymous was A Woman (1998), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1998) and a Los Angeles COLA Individual Artists Fellowship (2004). Since 1986, her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and is in the permanent collections of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as well as international collections.
In addition to her visual practice, Bernard is creator of the experimental music series "sound." as well as the founder of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS). Taking an active interest in instigating social exchange, Bernard founded SASSAS out of the need for a small sustainable organization dedicated to experimental music in Los Angeles. As director of SASSAS, Bernard has produced concerts and sound events at the historic Schindler House in West Hollywood as well as at REDCAT and the Ford Amphitheatre working with artists such as Glenn Branca, Harold Budd, Nels Cline, Petra Haden, Joseph Jarman, Pauline Oliveros, Tom Recchion, Wadada Leo Smith and James Tenney.
In addition to her visual practice, Bernard is creator of the experimental music series "sound." as well as the founder of The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS). Taking an active interest in instigating social exchange, Bernard founded SASSAS out of the need for a small sustainable organization dedicated to experimental music in Los Angeles. As director of SASSAS, Bernard has produced concerts and sound events at the historic Schindler House in West Hollywood as well as at REDCAT and the Ford Amphitheatre working with artists such as Glenn Branca, Harold Budd, Nels Cline, Petra Haden, Joseph Jarman, Pauline Oliveros, Tom Recchion, Wadada Leo Smith and James Tenney.
Her interest in music and the public commons has spurred three recent projects: soundCommons – an online forum for experimental musicians for which she received Creative Capital funding in 2002; a series of photographs of municipal band shells which Bernard sees as an architecture of public exchange, most recently exhibited at Tracy Williams LTD in New York; and “The Inquisitive Musician” a collaboration with artist and translator David Hatcher based on a 17th century German satire, “Musicus Curiosus, or Battalus, the Inquisitive Musician; the Struggle for Precedence between the Kunst Pfeifer and the Common Players." The premiere reading of the full "Inquisitive Musician" text took place at the experimental music club Tonic in November 2005 and featured Michael Smith, Shelley Hirsch, David Watson, Guy Richards Smit and Okkyung Lee among others.
SASSAS, The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound
