Tanya Bonakdar Gallery is pleased to present Signal Fires, a group exhibition which brings together twelve artists with ties to Southern California, all of whom are negotiating concepts of communication across vast distances: conceptually, formally, spiritually, and geographically.

In both recorded and fictional history, the act of lighting signal fires or beacons on high mountains to alert and relay urgent transmissions across spatial expanses is a story of language and how it can operate outside of the alphabetic or textual. This poetic, primeval telecommunication system requires pre-formed plans and communal understanding of the signal’s intention. Signal fires were precursors to heliographs, semaphore flags, lighthouse beacons, and Morse code. While the relationship of geographical location and relay of message are a thread that ties the works together, it’s the title words (signal and fires) which can playfully run into one another, becoming signifier, a slurred understudy of the central theme.

Approaching their processes of creation through the lenses of temporal and geographic language, the artists in the exhibition signal both to the past and towards an unrealized future. They are speaking strongly to concepts of duality: identity and heritage, technology and spirit, mythologies and personal narratives. Ultimately, it’s the signs and symbols of visual language that hold significant weight.

This exhibition was curated by Los Angeles Director, Lia Trinka-Browner

Lenard Smith, a first generation Ghanian-American artist, creates photographs that blend notions of sculpture and still-life photography. Repurposing matte boards from prints made when he was a teenager, Smith constructs arrangements for three brightly colored photographs. These images offer a fresh vernacular developed by the artist; symbols that are representative of and play with what we already know about the formal structure of buildings. Continuing a theme of disassembly and repair, All of Us, one part of a different series from 2020, depicts a broken duck ceramic figurine, positioned close together but not fully mended.