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. It is unclear if these subjects are related, despite the obvious doubling of visual cues, and Lassry offers few hints to suggest that these men have any association beyond their sitting for the same picture. By extension, Lassry subverts conventions in portrait photography by identifying his subjects with numbers, erasing the familiarity inherent in the act of naming, Men (055, 065) functions as an anti-portrait in which anonymity supplants intimacy. 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.
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.
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...
Mario Garcia Torres films a game of Charades among professional actors guessing the former North Korean dictator’s favorite Hollywood films...
Domes #1 represents a significant moment in Chicago’s career when her art began to change from a New York-influenced Abstract Expressionist style to one that reflected the pop-inflected art being made in Los Angeles...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
Douglas Gordon’s single-channel video The Left Hand Can’t See That The Right Hand is Blind, captures an unfolding scene between two hands in leather gloves—at first seemingly comfortable to be entwined, and later, engaged in a struggle...
Glenn Ligon’s diptych, Condition Repor t is comprised of two side-by-side prints...
Yael Bartana received great international attention for the trilogy series And Europe Will be Stunned (2007 – 2011)...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
Bread and Roses takes its name from a phrase famously used on picket signs and immortalized by the poet James Oppenheim in 1911...
Yael Bartana’s video work A Declaration was shot in southern Tel Aviv, on the visible border between that city and Jaffa...
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...
Shot in black and white and printed on a glittery carborundum surface, Black Hands, White Cotton both confronts and abstracts the subject of its title...
The image is borrowed from protests during Civil Rights where African Americans in the south would carry signs with the same message to assert their rights against segregation and racism...
Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society...