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...

Making Chinatown
© » KADIST

Ming Wong

2012

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

Untitled (Rolled up)
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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...

Made in Heaven
© » KADIST

Mark Leckey

2004

In Made In Heaven , we are face to face with a sculptural apparition, a divine visitation in the artist’s studio...

LAB
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Kori Newkirk

2013

LAB (2013) conjures the body as the trace of a sooty hand appears, spectrally, on a crumpled paper towel...

Corrupted file from page 14, (V1)
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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...

Argument
© » KADIST

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...

Untitled (Men)
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Matt Lipps

2011

In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...

Alignment
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Firenze Lai

2013

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

Peg and Jon
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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...

Same Old Crowd
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Li Ran

2016

The four-channel video installation Same Old Crowd departs from the documentation of an unknown city and takes place in an ambiguous temporal and spatial frame...

Central Station
© » KADIST

Firenze Lai

2013

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

Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors
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John Houck

2013

John Houck’s brown- , sienna- and golden-toned composition, Untitled #185, 65, 535 combinations of a 2×2 grid, 16 colors , features densely packed lines of color moving diagonally across the creased page...

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...

Baby Shoes, Never Worn
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John Houck

2013

Baby Shoes, Never Worn is part of photographer John Houck’s series of restrained still-life photographs capturing objects from his childhood...

Borrando la Frontera
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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...

Captain X
© » KADIST

Luke Butler

2008

In Captain X , Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, played by William Shatner, is limply draped over a large boulder in what looks like a hostile alien environment...