Last Postcards

2009 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

4H x 6W inches, 3.5H x 5.5W inches

Elisheva Biernoff

year born: 1980
gender: female
nationality: American

Last Postcards is a series of three small double-sided paintings on plywood in which Biernoff imagines the last communications from explorers lost in the wilderness. Biernoff’s choice of Everett Ruess, Percy Fawcett, and the conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader is particularly telling. On one level, the Last Postcards analogize the nineteenth-century explorer with the contemporary artist who looks for purpose in their work. This series continues Biernoff’s interest in the construction of myths and, to a certain extent, of utopias, ideas which have deep resonance in the cultural imagery of the West Coast. The careful, painted reproduction of a mass-produced object like a postcard reinforces this fictive aspect.


Elisheva Biernoff’s work engages and reconsiders the tradition of painting in an interesting way, often taking source material from media or recreating photographs through a careful trompe d’oeil technique. Thus, her work engages in the discussion of re-representation through painting, not aiming to portray any given reality faithfully but rather as the ideal way to engage with a subject matter that explores the intersection between myths, fictions and fantasies. In some cases, her works also address particular ecological concerns.


Colors:



Long Long Live
© » KADIST

Yao Jui-Chung

2013

Long Long Live (2013) takes the viewer to the setting of the Oasis Villa on Green Island, once a reform and re-education prison to house political prisoners during Taiwan’s martial law period...

Untitled 6/10 i-xxii
© » KADIST

Nathaniel Dorsky

2010

Dorsky’s pieces included in the Kadist Collection are small still photographs from twelve of his most important films...

Untitled (Women)
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Matt Lipps

2011

Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...

Stamp -X, Stamp -Y
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John Houck

2013

John Houck’s multi-layered photographic compositions immortalize nostalgic objects from the artist’s childhood, manipulated in the studio and in post-production into unreal still-life arrangements...

Paper Tigers…from a whisper to a scream
© » KADIST

Juan Capistran

2012

The 10 $1 bills that make up From a Whisper to a Scream (2012) read like instructions in origami...

Peg and Jon
© » KADIST

John Houck

2013

Houck’s Peg and John was made as part of a series of photographic works that capture objects from the artist’s childhood...

Re: Looking
© » KADIST

Wong Hoy Cheong

2004

Re: Looking marks a new phase in Wong’s work which connects his region’s history with other parts of the world...

Alignment
© » KADIST

Firenze Lai

2013

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...

Argument
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Firenze Lai

2013

Central Station, Alignment, and Argument are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...

White Minority
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Juan Capistran

2005

White Minority , is typical of Capistran’s sampling of high art genres and living subcultures in which the artist subsumes an object’s high art pedigree within a vernacular art form...

Borrando la Frontera
© » KADIST

Ana Teresa Fernández

2011

The artist writes about her work Borrando la Frontera, a performance done at Tijuana/San Diego border: “I visually erased the train rails that serve as a divider between the US and Mexico...

Corrupted file from page 14, (V1)
© » KADIST

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck

2008

Part of a larger series of photographic works, Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck’s Corrupted file from page 14 (V1) from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No...

Untitled (Rolled up)
© » KADIST

Jonathan Monk

2003

Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...

Central Station
© » KADIST

Firenze Lai

2013

Central Station, Alignment, and Sumo are “situation portraits” that present whimsical characters within distorted and troubling worlds...

The Class
© » KADIST

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

2005

The Class (2005) by Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook challenges the viewer’s personal sense of morality and tolerance by depicting a classroom from hell...

Making Chinatown
© » KADIST

Ming Wong

2012

Making Chinatown (2012) is a remake of Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic neo-noir film Chinatown ...

New Fall Lineup
© » KADIST

Conrad Ruiz

2009

It may take a minute to recognize the background of New Fall Lineup – the colors are tweaked into a world of cartoon and candy, and it is covered by leaping energetic figures and flying squirrels...