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.
Dutch Emerging: Ruben Janssen X GRA Fashion Bachelor 2023 – A Shaded View on Fashion From the back to the middle and around again — Ria’s wedding dress, Alan’s patterns and John’s model: ‘My project is an investigation into evolution, explored through prisms of biology, computation and a poetic personal narrative, shifting between timescales on an evolutionary timeline...
Getting schooled on the arts (via The Star) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles September 14, 2018 From surprise visits to schools, replacing white shoes with black, and referencing the Finnish education system as a possible one to emulate, the new Education Minister Dr Maszlee Malik has made waves with his fresh approach...
Consider the Drone , Barbara London and Aura Satz in conversation What’s in a sound? And what of a drone? Venerable curator Barbara London is joined in conversation by artist Aura Satz, an interdisciplinary artist based in London, UK with a particular interest in the sustained, ambient, and minimal...
Transgression, triggers, and the thousand cuts of “Blunt Knife” | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Photo courtesy of the artist June 25, 2019 By Corrie Tan (2,700 words, 13 -minute read) Content Warning: Mentions of a sexual relationship involving a teenager This response contains major spoilers for Blunt Knife by Eng Kai Er and A Doll’s House by Theatre of Europe...
Weekly Southeast Asia Radar: Vietnam's post-war writers; Burmese voices in book | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia ArtsEquator Radar BACC October 8, 2020 ArtsEquator’s Southeast Asia Radar features articles and posts about arts and culture in Southeast Asia, drawn from local and regional websites and publications – aggregated content from outside sources, so we are exposed to a multitude of voices in the region...
The photographic quality of the film Baobab is not only the result of a highly sophisticated use of black and white and light, but also of the way in which each tree is characterized as an individual, creating in the end a series of portraits...
The Dragon is the Frame by Mary Helena Clark is an elegy that is somewhat paradoxically organized as a film noir or murder mystery, one that pays direct homage to Hitchcock’s Vertigo ...
Itch explores the relationship between technology and daily human experience with a motorized arm that extends from within the gallery’s wall, moving up and down while holding a projector that shows a desperately scratching pair of hands....
The installation Self Tracking (the five stages of grief) was realized from a performance that is to be re-activated...
Installation art by Şakir Gökçebağ - The re:art Installation art by Şakir Gökçebağ The art of Şakir Gökçebağ plays with one’s perception of normality and challenges any prior convention or knowledge of how things were designed to function and how they exist in the order and logic of the everyday man-made world...
Untitled (rolled up) , is an abstract portrait of Owen Monk, the artist’s father and features an aluminum ring of 56.6 cm in diameter measuring 1.77 cm in circumference, the size of his father...
Untitled (Celestial Motors) is a visual meditation on an icon of modern urban Philippine life—the jeepney...