Cindy Bernard uses the photographic closeup to comment on painting. Bernard’s black and white images of fabric patterns from dresses, suits and remnants recall the abstract imagery of 1940s and 1950s painting. Yet Bernard’s work is not simply imitative. In selecting fabric patterns as her subject matter, Bernard alludes to the modem breakdown in categorical distinctions between art and mass culture. Painting becomes fashion, which then, through the intervention of the photographer, again takes its place on the gallery wall.

Spiral of Artificiality Catalog, Hallwalls, Buffalo, New York, 1987