Jon Bernson

Jon Bernson is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores and expands the traditional boundaries of storytelling, the narratives often unfolding in site-specific contexts. In 2015, Bernson was an Artist-In-Residence in the Artist Studio program at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, where he developed Antiprism, a multi-media installation that explored a series of unexplained broadcasts that interrupted the programming of numerous international television stations between 1986 and 2009.

His recent project, Third Eye Moonwalk (2016 - ongoing) incorporates music, video, meditation and performance. The project’s development has been supported by partners across numerous disciplines. The script received developmental readings through Playwrights Foundation and the National New Play Network at Stanford University and the Custom Made Theatre Co. in San Francisco. The videos were developed primarily during a residency at The Growlery, San Francisco, in July 2018. Bernson’s involvement with the Z Forge Devisors Group at Drop Forge & Tool in Hudson, NY fostered the addition of stylized movement into the live performances. In September 2018, Bernson will exhibit a new iteration of the project at Catharine Clark Gallery in conjunction with the gallery’s BOX BLUR initiative to engage visual and performing art in dialogue. Box Blur off-site will premiere a related installation at Minnesota Street Project’s 1275 location in San Francisco, October 6 – 27, 2018. In 2019, Crash Symbols will release the Third Eye Moonwalk audio drama (digitally and on cassette).

As a musician, Bernson has released more than twenty albums under several names. As a member of Exray’s, Bernson composed music that was featured in David Fincher’s Academy-Award winning film, The Social Network (2010). In 2017, Bernson contributed to Fake Newsroom, a collaborative visual magazine at Minnesota Street Project, as Deputy Editor under Dru Donovan. Other notable projects include Sound Affects, a large-scale multimedia work at the Sonos Studio in Los Angeles, and Beautification Machine, a sound sculpture created with Andy Diaz Hope, which premiered at Catharine Clark Gallery and at Miami Project. A version of the work was acquired by the Nevada Museum of Art for its permanent collection, and exhibited there in 2016. 

In 2018, Bernson will complete a four-year residency at the Playwrights Foundation, San Francisco. When Lighting The Voids—a play Bernson wrote, designed and scored about a Gulf Coast shipyard tragedy—was featured in the 2018 Bay Area Playwrights Festival and will be presented at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans in February 2019. Additional works Bernson created for theater include North by Inferno (2016), Distant Future Symposium (2015), A Guide to the Aftermath (2013), PDX to OAK (2012), an interactive play created for six actors and fourteen passengers on an overnight train trip from Portland to Oakland, and Overnighters is Over (2017), a StoryWorks play that re-imagines Jesse Moss's Sundance award-winning film as an immersive multimedia experience that was performed at the Linwood Dunn theater in Los Angeles.

Bernson lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Dylan Diaries (in collaboration with Josephine Taylor) is his third collaborative project at Catharine Clark Gallery, and Third Eye Moonwalk at Catharine Clark Gallery is his first solo project.