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...
In Monster (1996-97), the artist’s face becomes grotesque through the application of strips of transparent adhesive tape, typical of Gordon’s performance-based films that often depict his own body in action...
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 One Must , an image of a pair of scissors, accompanied by the words of work’s title, poses an ominous question about the relationship between the image and the text...
San Pedro is a seaside city, part of the Los Angeles Harbor, sitting on the edge of a channel...
The artist describes the work as “very performative video-pieces but they take on a more sculptural feel...
For I use to eat lemon meringue pie till I overloaded on my pancreas with sugar and passed out; It seemed to be a natural response to a society of abundance (1978), also known as the Bodybuilder series, Martinez asked male bodybuilding competitors to pose in whatever position felt “most natural.” They are obviously trained in presenting their ambitiously carved physiques, but their facial expressions seem comparatively unstudied...
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...
To make his series Shadows (1980), Gaines subjected 20 potted plants to a uniform procedure...
Ramirez’s The International Sail is the fifth in a series that features an upside-down worn out, mended and fragmented boat sail...
Like many of Pascal Shirley’s photographs, Oakland Girls aestheticizes a dingy rooftop and a cloudy sky...
Oded Hirsch’s video work Nothing New (2012) utilizes seemingly absurdist tropes to raise more trenchant questions about communal action and collective identity in modern day Israel...
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...
Yael Bartana’s video work A Declaration was shot in southern Tel Aviv, on the visible border between that city and Jaffa...
Intentionally Left Blanc alludes to the technical process of its own (non)production; a procedure known as retro-reflective screen printing in which the image is only fully brought to life through its exposure to flash lighting...
Yael Bartana received great international attention for the trilogy series And Europe Will be Stunned (2007 – 2011)...