Elisheva Biernoff’s exhibition Smashed Up House After the Storm includes several new pieces that incorporate sources such as postcards and architectural fragments, part of the artist’s expanding approach to making art. Biernoff has often referenced anonymous, found photographs, which she carefully recreates with paint, unearthing the latent meaning of these objects through sustained attention.
In recent work, Biernoff has remade postcards and posters and extended her practice to include faux fragments of the walls on which images are hung, using paint, wood, and other materials to recreate a range of surfaces and objects. We take a closer look, exploring the nuanced references and sources she draws from, and examining the infinitesimal details she records.
Beyond Our, one of Biernoff’s largest works to date, is an assemblage of three finely detailed paintings depicting a photograph, a poster, and a recreation of the wood-paneled wall on which they hang.
The hand-painted, asymmetrically shaped background resembles interior wood paneling from the 1970s. As Biernoff explains, “I was imagining the background as a section from a time capsule home, excised and brought into [the gallery], so it borrows an irregular trapezoidal shape from that era.”
Beyond Our takes its title from a partially obscured bulletin board in the painted photograph, reading “God is -er beyond our.” In the image, a man stands in front of a dark, obscured hallway, with his hands covering his face, in a gesture of “despair or exhaustion or of being overwhelmed,” Biernoff writes. She links the gesture to a Judaic tradition of covering the eyes when saying certain prayers, a protection against “something [that] is too profound to see,” she notes.
Biernoff also connects the pose to the Bible verse Luke 24, which is referenced in tiny letters on the bulletin board. Biernoff writes, “The passage is about the resurrection, and in it the apostles fail to recognize Jesus, and hide their faces from two angels. However one interprets the Bible, the idea of standing baffled before something incomprehensible is easy to relate to.”
Biernoff pairs the snapshot with a poster showing the “blue marble” photograph of earth, taken in 1972 by an astronaut on Apollo 17, the last manned mission to the moon. For Biernoff, the image represents the uneasy optimism that characterized American culture in the 1970s.
Biernoff presents the painted photograph and poster as two lone subjects floating in a darkened space, both touching on the mysteries of their respective solitude and reflecting the unsure nature of memory and belief.
Fragment captures a black and white postcard of a sculpture pinned to a wood-paneled wall with a single pushpin, each element painted according to Biernoff’s meticulous style. The artist renders the postcard recto and verso, picturing on the front a twelfth-century stone relief by the French Romanesque sculptor Gislebertus originally installed in the north portal of the Cathedral of Saint Lazarus at Autun. As seen here, Eve moves through the Garden of Eden, one hand resting against her cheek in an ambiguous gesture and reaching with the other for the forbidden fruit.
On the back of the postcard, Biernoff has invented lines from a fictionalized correspondence, painting a note “written” on the postcard’s verso. Told in the first person from the perspective of Eve, Biernoff’s text traces the unusual provenance of the sculpture throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Addressed to Nobel-prize winning Polish poet and essayist Wisława Szymborska, Biernoff invokes their shared fondness for fragmentation, asking “Do you call that resurrection or exile?”
Brief history of the north portal lintel,
church of Saint-Lazare, Autun.
c. 1130 – 1766
Suspended, I watched pilgrims pass.
1766 – 1856
Tastes changed. Knocked down,
earthbound, I held up a house
(12 Rue de la Place du Champ de Mars).
Adam got lost.
1856 – the present
The house was demolished.
By a wonder, I was salvaged, then sold,
scrubbed and spotlit. Do you call that
resurrection or exile?
The idea of displacement echoes throughout the piece. It is a feature of the story of the biblical Eve, banished from Eden for plucking fruit from the tree of knowledge. The lintel fragment has also been displaced—it was removed from the church doorway for which it was created and used in the foundation of a nearby house. “Even the background registers absence and removal,” Biernoff writes, noting the rectangular marks on the painted wood where pictures were removed. A single thumbtack, formed by the artist in fired clay, secures the postcard in place, secreting the note and attendant sun spot resting beneath. As Biernoff notes, Fragment is “a record of loss, but also of rediscovery, and of traces and ruins that persist.”
Biernoff’s extension of the picture plane marks a shift in her practice, but wood paneling has been a motif in her work for many years. The artist’s attention has often been drawn to photographs of domestic spaces with warm-toned wooden walls, which date the pictures to a hard-to-pinpoint but not-so-distant past. In a 2015 painting of a Polaroid, the knotty pine background suggests the privacy of a basement or den, while the rings in the wood recall the swirl of galaxies in a night sky.
In contrast to the sense of communion evoked by many of the postcards and family photographs that serve as Biernoff’s sources, the artist is also drawn to curious moments of interiority. Biernoff’s meditative process seeks to glean the inner thoughts of her solitary subjects, all the while redirecting viewers’ attention to larger themes about human isolation and connection.
In Solitaire, also featured in Smashed Up House After the Storm, Biernoff recreates a photograph of a woman in an interior space with round windows that suggest portals of a ship. The warm tones of a wooden section of her cabin wall are mirrored in the orange and red hues of the bed and chair, and curtains frame the windows. Despite the domestic elements of the scene—or perhaps because of them—the woman appears deeply alone, playing solitaire at sea. The ship’s homey interior only emphasizes the actual distance from home, in the same way the proximity of the photographer seems to underscore the subject’s solitude.
