Elisheva Biernoff
Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Look Out, Elisheva Biernoff's first solo show at the gallery — a romantic investigation of lost artifacts that takes form as meticulous miniature paintings and two video installations. Biernoff makes work about things on the edge of perception: the invisible, the overlooked and the endangered.
Her trompe l'oeil paintings on thin plywood recapture discarded ephemera, from personal snapshots to common playing cards. Paired together, the painted photographs suggest loose associations between unrelated pictures. House of Cards assembles fifteen two-sided paintings into a sculptural house of cards, each depicting a cultural attainment or noteworthy figure. The video works toy with the possible existence of things outside our experience: in Hide & Seek, a 180-degree projection evokes a forest glade at night, its flashlight beam tracking a rustling it never reveals, while Mountains of Instead uses the theatrical illusion of Pepper's Ghost to reflect a unicorn onto a diorama of oblivious grazing horses.
“What initially appears to be an exhibition of carefully selected found and vintage photographs turns out, upon closer inspection, to be a show of small, carefully disguised paintings.”