In establishing a deliberate distance between viewer and subject, Lassry raises questions about representation itself and how all portraits are, in effect, fully constructed objects that only gain meaning once we ascribe them with our own personal associations and emotions. An example of this is Floor, Legs (2013), a gelatin silver print in which a large black rectangle obscures the upper half of a candid photograph with two figures that are ultimately only identifiable by their legs and feet, which are even then indiscernibly crossed and posed beyond easy recognition. Even though its unclear if Lassry’s source image is a found photograph or an original composition, the underlying themes – of the photograph’s function as an object, and the impossibility of discerning “the real” through its representation – continue to resonate.
Elad Lassry explores how visual languages are constructed across multiple disciplines and media. His larger body of work responds to the relationship between artistic mediums and their forms, and his prints question familiar modes of viewership and our continuous desire to find and identify clear narratives in photographs. Lassry utilizes both found photographs and original compositions in his work, a juxtaposition that challenges notions of authorship and attribution. By emphasizing how photographic images are deliberately staged and constructed, Lassry destabilizes notions that photographs depict and document “the real.” In foregrounding the image as object, he also suggest that the photograph only provides a referent for a presence that “has-been” but that no longer exists in the current moment. Born in Israel, Lassry earned his BFA in film from the California Institute of Arts in 2003 and his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2007.
Yael Bartana’s video work A Declaration was shot in southern Tel Aviv, on the visible border between that city and Jaffa...
Yael Bartana received great international attention for the trilogy series And Europe Will be Stunned (2007 – 2011)...
“Untitled” is inspired by the movie “Opening Night” by John Cassavetes with Gena Rowlands playing the role of a fallen woman, anguished by her distressed life...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
In Up All Night, Waiting for the Chelsea Hotel Magic to Spark My Creativity Mario García Torres constructs and documents a hypothetical scene, situating himself within a lineage of artists and creatives that used to congregate at the historic hotel...
Blind Spencer is part of the series “Blind Stars” including hundreds of works in which the artist cut out the eyes of Hollywood stars, in a symbolically violent manner...
In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...
The voids in Baldessari’s painted photographs are simultaneously positive and negative spaces, both additive and subtractive...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...
Weekly Picks: Indonesia (22 - 28 April 2019) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Weekly To Do April 22, 2019 Top Picks of Indonesia art events in Solo, Bandung, and Jakarta from 22-28 April 2019 One way to spread values in life is through the media of films...
A Portrait: Covering and Cleaning is an installation of six black-and-white video projections...
In his composition, Chocolate Bars, Eggs, Milk, Lassry’s subjects are mirrored in their surroundings (both figuratively, through the chocolate colored backdrop and the brown frame; and literally, in the milky white, polished surface of the table), as the artist plays with color, shape, and the conventions of representational art both within and outside of the photographic tradition...
The black-and-white photograph Men (055, 065) (2012) depicts two similarly built young men – young and slim, with dark tousled hair and a square jaw line – seated aside one another in identical outfits...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
The Damaged series by Lisa Oppenheim takes a series of selected photographs from the Chicago Daily News (1902 – 1933) as its source material...
Architectural details become abstracted renderings in Chris Wiley’s inkjet prints 11 and 20 (both 2012)...
Butter Mountain is part of an ongoing series of works that combines a sense of painterly mass and substance with sculptural language to examine the synergy between a topographical landscape and a landscape of the human condition...
In a style that is unique of Tokoudagba, he evokes the kings, gods and their symbols related to the earth, water, air and fire, usually on a white background...
Musa is a visual and textual work by Minia Biabiany and the starting point of a broader research around the sexuality of Caribbean women, the historical legacy of slavery, and the artist’s own female lineage...