Lassry defines his practice as consumed with "pictures" — generic images culled from vintage picture magazines and film archives, redeploying them in a variety of media, including photography, film, drawing and sculpture. Leaving little distance between the commercial and the analytical, he is sometimes described as a post-Pictures Generation artist.[3]
Photography
Starting with popular modes of production such as magazine advertising, he uses silk-screening and photography to revive iconic art-historical arrangements, such as the pairing of mother and child or the arrangement of fruit a conventional still life, disrupting their original harmony with geometric displacements or a palette of bright colours.[4] His chromogenic color prints — still life compositions, photocollages, and studio portraits of friends and celebrities — never exceed the dimensions of a magazine page or spread (35 x 28 cm) and are displayed in frames that derive their colors from the dominant hues in the photographs.[5] In certain black-and-white gelatin silver-prints the frames are silver.[6]
Films
Lassry often displays his photographs beside 16mm film projections in a continuous loop on the wall.[7] The films are projected according to dimensions similar to the still images on view, allowing them to be seen in the context of the basic photographic image of which each frame is finally composed; in addition, the films are not converted into a digital format and are always presented in their original form.[citation needed] In his silent 35 mm film Untitled (king snake) (2010), Lassry alternates between two different scenes. In the first, a woman — played by the actress Rose Byrne[8] — appears who seemingly converses with another person. In the second, the viewer sees only the woman's hands, in which a California kingsnake coils itself together.[9]
Performance
In early 2012, Lassry staged a warm-up with dancers from the New York City Ballet at the Hayworth Theater in Los Angeles.[10] In September 2012, he debuted Untitled (Presence) at The Kitchen, an exhibition and corresponding performance under the same title. The performance work featured ten dancers from the American Ballet Theatre and New York City Ballet interacting with brightly colored moving walls that had cutouts similar to those in the gallery space and on Lassry's billboard along the High Line. Karen Rosenberg reviewed the exhibition and performance in The New York Times, calling it "seductive and thought-provoking" and stating that "it encouraged you to think about the camera as a choreographer of vision."[11]Tim Griffin, director of The Kitchen, curated the exhibition.[12]
Exhibitions
One year after graduating from the University of Southern California, Lassry mounted a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in the Film, Video and New Media gallery.[13] The exhibition consisted of two films, Untitled (Agon), 2007 and Zebra and Woman, 2007.[14]
Solo exhibitions of Lassry's work have since been held at, among others, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,[15][16]Tramway, Glasgow, and an exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada, curated by artist Jeff Wall. His first major monographic exhibition in the United States, Elad Lassry: Sum of Limited Views, was on view at the Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis and subsequently travelled to Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland. In conjunction with the 2010 show Sum of Limited Views, the Kunsthalle Zürich published the exhibition book, Elad Lassry.[17]
At the 54th Venice Biennale, Lassry debuted the film Untitled (Ghost), 2011, along with several photographs in the ILLUMInazioni - ILLUMInations exhibition at the Venetian Arsenale.[18] His work was also included in the 2009 New Museum Triennial and the 2008 California Biennial.
In 2012, Lassry created a billboard for the High Line in New York. The large billboard is an alluring image of two young women, both dressed alike, gazing out of two small portholes into a sea of green. The High Line Billboard was scheduled to overlap with Lassry's exhibition and performance, Untitled (Presence), at The Kitchen.[19]
Recognition
Lassry was the winner of the 2007 John Jones Art on Paper Award. As part of the prize, Lassry exhibited several works at the 2008 Zoo Art Fair made over the 12-month period after receiving the award.[20]
In 2010, he was nominated for the Rencontres d'Arles Discovery Award (France) and exhibited his works.
In 2011, art critic Sarah Schmerler wrote in Art in America: "[if] Elad Lassry hadn't come along at this particular moment in photography's history, theorists would probably have had to invent him."[21]
^Dorin, Lisa. "Film, Video, New Media: At The Art Institute of Chicago With the Donna and Howard Stone Gift". Art Institute of Chicago. Yale University Press. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |url= (help)
^Art Institute of Chicago. "Elad Lassry". Film, Video and New Media. The Art Institute of Chicago. Retrieved 20 July 2011.
^Kunsthalle Zurich. "Elad Lassry". Past Exhibitions. Kunsthalle Zurich. Archived from the original on 24 March 2012. Retrieved 20 July 2011.
^Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. "Elad Lassry: Sum of Limited Views". Past Exhibitions. Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. Retrieved 20 July 2011.
^Deutsche Borse Group. "2011 Nominated Artists". Deutsche Borse Photography Prize. Deutsche Borse. Archived from the original on 6 August 2011. Retrieved 20 July 2011.
