Billis/Williams Gallery is pleased to present CAROL INEZ CHARNEY: Imprint of Silence, a feature of the artist’s new series of photographs. The exhibition features five ChromaLux dye sublimation prints on aluminum ranging from 24×24 inches to 36×48 inches. The exhibition opens with a reception on September 12th and continues through October 10th.
Carol Inez Charney’s new series, Imprint of Silence, is a photographic meditation on censorship and erasure. The banning of books feels like an anachronism but we are in a moment when this is more relevant than ever. Too often, the slow slide towards an authoritarian regime begins with censorship of the arts and artists whose creative voices speak the truths those trying to deny freedom and equality don’t want seen or heard. Artists ask the hard questions – point out the absurd – show us what could be. Those trying to suppress must silence artists’ voices in order to obfuscate the truth.
In this new series, smoke drifts against dark grounds creating compositions that feel like memory made visible. They are an echo of voices pressed into silence, of books burned or buried for daring to imagine too freely. In many pieces, the forms of the smoke mirror the storylines of banned and challenged books, their narratives briefly reassembled in air before fading away.
Three distinct bodies of work make up the series: banned books, Fahrenheit 451, and the libraries. Those inspired by specific books are titled as such: Maus, The Handmaid’s Tale, Catch-2. The forms of drifting smoke reference interaction between characters. The next group is under the title F451, referencing Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451. These images suggest individual book spines, their abstracted interiors reflecting both destruction and the endurance of ideas. The final group is the Library series, where smoke rises into the towering spines of countless books—an imagined archive of stories once banned or challenged.
Among the images are writers such as Maya Angelou, Art Spiegelman, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, alongside the many other voices who have faced suppression. Together, these works reflect the scale of loss and the persistent threat from those who seek to silence creative expression. Imprint of Silence reminds us that ideas cannot be erased; they rise and fade like smoke, yet their power remains.
Carol Inez Charney (b. 1959, United States) received her BA in painting from the University of Santa Cruz and her MFA in photography from San Jose State University and has exhibited extensively on the West Coast and in New York. Her work is included in numerous private collection as well as the US Department of State Art Bank, Morgan Stanley Art Collection, Stanford University Medical Center Art Collection, AT&T Corporate Art Collection, Microsoft Corporate Art Collection, American Capitol Art Collection, Chapman University Permanent Collection of Art (Orange, CA), and IndyMac Bank Corporate Art Collection. She lives and works in Santa Cruz, CA.
