Photo Poetics
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.