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Elisheva Biernoff | Look OutPost an Event »

Eli Ridgway Gallery

February 2 - March 10, 2013

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172 Minna Street San Francisco, CA 94105
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Elisheva Biernoff | Look Out
Elisheva Biernoff makes work about things on the edge of perception -- the invisible, overlooked and endangered. Look Out, her first solo show at Eli Ridgway Gallery, is a romantic investigation of lost artifacts, taking form as meticulous miniature paintings and two video installations. Biernoff's trompe l'oeil paintings on thin plywood recapture discarded ephemera, from personal snapshots to common playing cards. In pairing paintings of found photographs, she suggests loose associations between unrelated pictures -- sometimes through enigmatic categories like "indoor plants," other times imagining the two photographic images as separate frames of a continuous scene. House of Cards is comprised of 15 two-sided paintings of playing cards arranged as a sculptural house of cards. Each card depicts a cultural attainment (such as a painting by Ingres) or figure (like John Muir) on the verso. The piece is at once a celebration of human accomplishment and a recognition of its precariousness. Her two video works toy with the possible existence of things outside our experience and perception. In Hide & Seek, a 180º projection evokes a forest glade at night, illuminated by a moving flashlight beam. The beam tracks the sound of rustling in the foliage, but never reveals the source of the sound, leaving the audience suspended on the threshold of discovery. Mountains of Instead uses the illusionary theatrical technique of Pepper's Ghost to reflect a projection of a unicorn onto a small diorama of oblivious grazing horses -- a spectacular mythical beast makes an appearance and goes unnoticed. Elisheva Biernoff has studied at Slade School of London, Yale University, and California College of the Arts. She has been included in numerous group and solo exhibitions in the Bay Area including those at the CCA Wattis Institute, Triple Base Gallery, Root Division, Eli Ridgway Gallery and Headlands Center for the Arts. Biernoff's work is included in the collection of the Kadist Art Foundation. She lives and works in San Francisco, CA.