Biernoff ’s details forge connections
Artist’s absorption with subjects of old photographs shows in small, fine strokes
There’s an initial confusion that sets in when you first see Elisheva Biernoff ’s “Paintings” at the Fraenkel Gallery. They look exactly like discarded photographs — the sort you’d find in shoe boxes at thrift stores, sold five for a dollar — right down to the smudge marks and “Me. Wish I was Home” scribbled in pencil on the back. But the way they’re presented, behind glass and in neat little stands, there’s a sense they must be more than that.
And, as you draw closer, you realize, of course, they are. The knots in the wood, the bits of grass, the Domino’s Pizza box, the cheetah print on the woman’s dress — they’re all made up of Biernoff ’s tiny, steady brushstrokes.
Those strokes ask — maybe even force — you to consider the image in a way you probably never would have had you come across it at a flea market. They ask you to consider the image in the same way Biernoff did for the weeks she spent reproducing it, layering paint upon paint.
Biernoff has been working on this collection of paintings for about five years. This work has consumed her for longer than she ever imagined when
she began. She has trouble articulating what it is exactly that has kept her focus here. But obsession — and that’s certainly at play here, to one degree or another — isn’t always an easy thing to explain.
“It’s partly being able to become so absorbed in something I want to look at and wanting to communicate something of that absorption to the viewer of the painting,” she says. “The painting looks like the photograph. But not quite. They’re always a little off.”
Biernoff ’s art has always involved an unusual degree of attention to detail. Her current project came about organically, an offshoot of work she’d been creating before.
The first entry point, she says, was a series she called “Last Postcards.” She’d pick an adventurer or explorer who had disappeared during their travels — say, Everett Ruess, a young writer and poet who vanished while exploring the Utah desert in the 1930s. Then she’d study everything from his background and his writing to the printing processes of the era and the sorts of stamps and postal markings used. From all that, she would create a fictional final postcard from the person. Like the works she makes now, these postcards were double sided and done on thin pieces of plywood. They were also almost entirely convincing as the objects they simulated.
Her focus turned to photographs when she was invited to create a display for a vacant storefront in Bayview-Hunters Point as part of an “Art in Storefronts” program. She had no connection to the area, so she set out to involve the people who lived there. She went around asking residents to loan her family photos, which she then re-created as paintings and hung up in the window as though the storefront were a “community living room wall.” “They were different,” she says of the work she made then, “not quite as layered and involved and detailed, but in spirit they’re related.”
It was her first exercise in getting to know the subject of a photograph better, perhaps, than even the person who had taken the initial image. “That project turned me on to other people’s photographs,” Biernoff says. “I’d notice these bins of discarded, orphan photos that I started wanting to rescue.”
So she began her collection, one whose size she’s not even sure of anymore. “At least several hundred. A thousand? I’m not sure. I’m always collecting them, and every one I buy I think I could paint.”
There’s no strict rule to the sort of photographs she chooses to collect. Many of them focus on a single subject or two, but one just shows the sky and the very ends of tree branches reaching into the frame. Some are in color; some are blackand-white. Sometimes she paints the closed fist of a tiny child; sometimes she paints the deepening blue of the ocean. The attention to detail remains constant, however. She copies the shape and size, the Kodak trademarks on the back, the bits of ripped-away paper that come from tearing a memory from a scrapbook. “I’m interested in the photographs as objects,” Biernoff explains. “Not just as images. So the size, the scale, the intimacy is an integral part of the story they tell. … It gives it a richer view of the photograph as an object with a history.”
There are some loose visual themes that emerge as you move with Biernoff from one subject to the next. A soldier in the jungle, a guide walking into a forest, a polar bear with refracted light all around it — each a solitary figure in a landscape that breaks apart. “There’s always a bit of a logical progression or a chain of connection from one painting to the next,” she says, though she also admits that the chain isn’t always clear to her until she can look back in retrospect.
The real connection that exists from piece to piece, however, is much less literal and not at all visible — it’s the deep regard she holds for each photograph, the connection she forges with each subject even if she’ll never know them. “I’m getting to spend time with someone who is absent,” she says. “Absent because they’re unknown to me, because they’re far away, because wherever they are, they’re either an older version of the person in the photograph or no longer living.”
Biernoff doesn’t often get asked about this connection, the real intention behind her facsimiles. More often, people who view her work want to know about her technique. They want to know how she’s able to so skillfully reproduce something that seems so delicate and complicated.
And yet, both conversations end up revolving around the same thing: time. She makes these images because of the time it affords her with a single subject. And time is how she’s able to do it. “It’s not a particular talent. It’s just a kind of commitment to slogging through and caring for them and looking at them as closely as I can over many many days and kind of refining the ways I see.”
In a certain way, focusing on how well executed the reproduction is, is to focus on the wrong thing. Her paintings aren’t meant to be perfect. She doesn’t feel a connection to photorealism, for instance. She sees her paintings as their own objects. A photo is taken all at once. Her images are a record of “activity, thought, response, emotion,” of brushstrokes and handwork.
“In the remaking, I’m also reshaping subtly,” Biernoff says. “And (I’m) revealing the slant or subjectivity of my seeing, and also I hope showing something of the deep regard that I feel for the photos.”
There’s a small irony to Biernoff ’s work, or rather to what makes it so compelling. It doesn’t reproduce very well, which is to say, in pictures of her work that appear in brochures and books, much of the detail fades and so does, to an extent, the meaning that the detail is meant to reveal. She knows this too.
“I don’t mind that so much,” Biernoff says. She’d rather they be viewed in person, head bowed, eyes jumping from stroke to stroke. “You kind of need the hand and the eye and the touch. So that seems fitting.”