Elad Lassry
On April 10th Massimo De Carlo gallery presents a new solo exhibition by Elad Lassry. The exhibition unveils a series of new works that synthesize the artists last few years of research, challenging for the second time the industrial space of Massimo De Carlo’s gallery in via Ventura.
At the core of these new works is an inquiry into what engagements are possible with the picture, as well as a questioning of the picture’s condition, capacities, and failures as a contemporary unit. Elad Lassry resorts to questioning the picture itself as an entity, as well as an unresolved space of representation, bouncing back and forth between an acknowledgement of the picture as an image-based unit to a treatment usually reserved for an object. In doing so, the artist challenges the picture’s given status of flatness, allowing at times, the participation that occurs between the picture and multiple agencies, economies, and systems to take on an actual form.
These works take further Elad Lassry’s philosophical proposal where the image oscillates between its picturehood and objecthood, to an almost literal space. This idea is rooted in an exercise of dismantling the photograph, where its indexicality is lost, leaving it stripped of its details and down to formal elements only.
Elad Lassry is interested in the use of analog methods in exposing contemporary phenomena - one of fluidity, elasticity, and new opportunities for experience with the picture. These strategies in the work relentlessly ask the viewer to abandon the act of deciphering between photographic information and visible marks, or objects (non-photographic information). For example, in a new body of works titled Untitled (Swimmers), 2015, Elad Lassry turns to an industrial technique in which a set of silver gelatin prints, beads, and pigments are embedded within acrylic glass. While obscuring the translucence of acrylic glass, each element is married to a different art history – the tropes of black and white photography versus the gestures, marks, and compositions in the plastic arts.
The Artist
Elad Lassry was born in Tel Aviv in 1977; he lives and works in Los Angeles.
Elad Lassry creates or rediscovers images from a vast array of sources, redeploying them in a variety of media, including photography, film, drawing and sculpture.
Lassry describes his pictures, which are all exactly the same scale, as ‘something that’s suspended between a sculpture and an image’. The artist achieves this through a play of virtual and actual space. The image in each picture proposes a virtual space, while the frame, which is not a supplement to the image but an extension of it, carves out an actual space for the object to occupy. Lassry then deploys the image as an ambiguous, free-floating signifier, which combines with the frame to create a new set of conditions. This hybrid entity becomes a kind of epistemological puzzle, engaging the viewer’s perceptual faculties. How does its objecthood affect our reading of the image? How does the subject matter of the image affect our perception of the object?
Lassry’s work is in the permanent collections of the the MoMA – Museum of Modern Art of New York; Guggenheim, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; MOCA - Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.