Elad Lassry

About

A boundary-straddling artist whose work problematizing the notion of a picture has carved out new dimensions in photographic discourse, Lassry creates interruptions and tension in evaluating images and objects. Referring to his pictures as "units," his works establish and aggregate an archival syntax that pushes photographs into other things, a destabilization where each specific picture is both present and absent and simultaneously implicates other proposals.
 
For this exhibition, Lassry shows photographs and sculptures that alternate between flat experience and dimensionality. Black and white photographs of ski sets and boots bear signs of erasure or intervention, and outtakes from an imaginary fashion shoot are pieces of information suggesting systems much larger than themselves. In the center of the gallery, a line of discarded hollow air compressors with incongruous lids made of cushiony polyester fiber gestures toward a proposed space of meaning, where what is experienced and documented have shifted. They exist in the realm of suggestion, where every possibility of intersection is valid, where the ghost of one system posits the limitations of the next. To this effect, the photographs of boots in a different series of pictures are studded with steel and collide with categorical images of sea life. Large stacks of carpet function as stations of oscillation, interrupting sightlines for viewing the photographs while compressing their own existence in space.
 
Lassry's work questions whether a picture can have dimension, whether an object can be flat. In Photoshop, flattening an image is the final step before printing, a collapsing of layers into one plane. This counterintuitive gesture can be seen reclaimed in Lassry's work. As images have proliferated beyond comprehension, as doubt has been sown into the veracity of any picture, Lassry proposes that each layer suggests another layer, that images should become objects while reality and representation become more aleatory.