SANTA MONICA, CA.- William Turner Gallery is presenting Longing & Belonging, the gallery’s first solo exhibition by Los Angeles–based artist Guillermo Bert. This landmark exhibition brings together three major series spanning two decades of Bert’s practice—Warriors, Encoded Textiles, and Jacquard Punch Cards—each exploring the intersections of tradition, technology, and migration in the 21st century.
Born in Santiago, Chile, and based in Los Angeles, Bert transforms materials and digital media into cross-cultural artifacts that preserve stories often silenced by systems of displacement. His works fuse ancient craft traditions with augmented reality, QR codes, and 3D modeling, creating a poetic dialogue between the handmade and the high-tech.
In Warriors, Bert reimagines the ancient terracotta army of the Qin Dynasty as honor guard for today’s society, comprised of our essential workers and often unsung heroes—laborers, nurses, teachers, and farm workers. Each life-sized, laser-cut birch figure is modeled from 3D scans of real individuals, standing as a contemporary monument to endurance, dignity, and service. The precisely etched surfaces capture both fragility and strength, while an accompanying soundscape allows visitors to hear the workers’ own voices, grounding their stories in lived experience. Together, these figures form a resonant chorus of resilience—guardians not of emperors, but of the collective humanity that sustains us.
In Encoded Textiles, Bert collaborates with Indigenous artisans across the Americas to weave QR-coded patterns into traditional fabrics. When scanned, the codes reveal short films that share oral histories, poetry, and personal narratives—turning each textile into a living archive.
Finally, the Jacquard Punch Card series revisits one of the earliest coding technologies—the 17th-century punch card, developed for weaving patterns on the loom, which prefigured the computer by utilizing a binary code as a form of language. By burning portraits of immigrants into layered punch cards, Bert creates haunting hybrids of tapestry and code, weaving together the analog and the algorithmic, the historical and the contemporary.
Through these works, Bert explores how human identity and migration continue to be woven—literally and metaphorically—into the fabric of global modernity.
Guillermo Bert has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (where his work is currently on exhibition in Grounded), the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery, the Nevada Museum of Art (site Bert’s first major museum exhibition in 2023, entitled The Journey, ), and Museum of Latin American Art (which will hold a solo exhibition for Bert in 2026), and at the Rhode Island Museum of Art, where it’s currently in an exhibition of the museum’s recent acquisitions. His works are included in major collections at LACMA, The Smithsonian Institution, the Rhode Island Museum of Art, and Museum of Latin American Art, amongst other important collections.
