A model poses in a sports jersey, embossed with the Adidas logo and the initials “bc,” her eyes directly engaging the viewer. A smear down her cheek, where the makeup from her left side has been wiped away, makes her gaze slightly off-center, intensifying the uncanny quality of the image. BC Lifestyle CU was conceived by the British artist collective Bernadette Corporation and photographed by Benjamin Alexander Huseby. It belongs to a series of similar striking and sequential “lifestyle” pictures, all of which include text by the collective. This particular portrait was also used as the cover image for the Bernadette Corporation’s book, 2000 Wasted Years, 2014, in addition to the corresponding retrospective, both produced by Artists Space.

Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years gathers a vast array of visual and textual material spanning the rich image grammar and styling of Bernadette Corporations’s operations within the realm of so called style-culture, including a fashion line; their interventions into the publishing culture of the ‘90s, including BC’s own short-lived magazine Made in USA; the fragmented output of Pedestrian Cinema developed during the group’s time in Berlin; up to the fusion of poetics, branding and meta-commentary that characterized Bernadette Corporation’s gallery shows of the 2000s. The book extends from their retrospective Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years at Artists Space in 2012, constituting yet another site to reframe the activities of BC spanning the past 20 years.