I’m using that aspect of photography to play yet another trick, to draw attention to how things are not what they seem by making something that is not what it seems.

The pictures in my recent work all have an intended subject – say, a portrait of a friend on the balcony – and then they have an unintended interruption that intrudes so completely on the picture that it becomes a subject in its own right.

You can’t look at a double exposure of a lawn party without seeing the double exposure first and foremost – the mistakes are loud, and assert themselves.

In the paintings, mischance becomes the subject. There’s something absurd and obstinate about laboring to perfectly replicate a mistake, and that gives the paintings a charge that the photographs don’t have. 

[TEXT/VERSO]

This + the next one are of Bill + Earl on a sand dune.

Can’t figure out why the waves unless it’s the heat?

Do [sic] have any idea?

WHITE SANDS

The paintings are reservoirs of time and concentration, where everything is made on purpose. They are slow and quiet and made over many months.

They have to be this way - small and concentrated – in order to get under the skin a little, to disorient a little, to ask that you look closer, and look again, like I do.

Elisheva Biernoff (b. 1980) received an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA from Yale University. She also studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and was a recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship. Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, among others.