Fabric Photos

From Flash Art, 1988

Mark Selwyn: Much of your work appears gestural, spontaneous and very intimate, yet the source of the image is a mechanical reproduction…

Cindy Bernard: I’m intimating that there is a certain degree of calculation behind any gesture and that the degree of meaning attached to the artist’s hand is over emphasized in terms of its emotional significance. With the fabric photos it’s often difficult to distinguish the source of the image – whether its a photograph, a drawing or a photograph of a painting. I choose the fabrics for qualities that evoke a response because we have been trained to equate gesture with a feeling or mood. I want the viewer to think about the assumptions underlying those tendencies. 

MS: Do you see your work as political in any way? Doesn’t the medium / process of photography have an almost inherently socio-political character to it in the way it mediates reality?

CB: Of course. But there is a degree of sophistication that mush exist on the part of the viewer before there is an assumption of mediation. The traditions of photo documentary or cinema verité are predicated on the insistance that the camera is objective. Obviously what I am doing deviates from a traditional view of photographic practice. I almost render the relationship of the photograph to what is real an irrelevant question.

View related exhibitions, press and journal posts
Select View Larger to see titles for the works below