Artforum
2010
Glen Helfand

A seemingly empty storefront with fall leaves strewn on the floor is not such an anomaly these economically parched days, but in Elisheva Biernoff's tromp l'oeil installation, which mulls over perpetually troublesome nature versus culture tension, they're props, a paper confetti of handcrafted debris. The dead plants, along with crumpled gum wrappers, cigarette butts, religious brochures, and pinecones, are all alternately remade with authentic artificiality. Indeed, the artist's painted plaster stones are so intricately detailed that they invoke Vija Celmin's rock replicas in To Fix the Image in Memory, 1977-82.

Biernoff's two-story installation is titled Folly, 2010, a term that suggests breeziness, but also recklessly daft visions. Her bittersweet project hints at the unsustainable (plants and animals of various unrelated religions make commingled appearances here), as well as the inefficient (there's something wonderfully nuts about carefully crafting soiled tissues in fixed form). While the artifice of the work could tilt towards theme park, the installation plays like an immersive elegy. To this end, Biernoff presents an archaeology of handpainted floral wallpapers on a seemingly excised living room corner—a Gordon Matta-Clark with an eye toward decorated domesticity—to reveal a fraying sense of natural history throughornament. the base layer is a bucolic design of Neoclassical ruins, while other sections present an array of posies or a 1950s pattern of ordered daisies.

Biernoff provides other illusory windows into the landscape—effectively created in video, audio, and backlit cut paper. The approach is highly theatrical, but the installation is austere enough to make this folly less a diversion than a seductive setting within which to ponder the visual splendors of collapse.