Elad Lassry
1977–

Elad Lassry “reactivates” images in his art, which includes film, photography, drawing, sculpture, and performance. “I am especially interested in finding pictures that have fallen between the cracks, that have been destabilized, misplaced, or rejected,” he has explained. Based in Los Angeles, Lassry is heir to the Pictures Generation artists, who appropriated preexisting imagery in exploring how images are produced, disseminated, and interpreted. In Lassry’s work, the distinction between a found picture and a staged one is often difficult to discern. His meticulously crafted, glossy photographs play havoc with traditions such as still life and portraiture, in turn disrupting customs of framing, display, and installation. Drawings become films, and photographs register as sculptures as the very boundary between object and image grows increasingly fluid.

Lassry’s silent film Untitled employs reconstructions of photographs illustrating principles of perspective, which the artist found in a textbook from the 1970s. To these seemingly straightforward enactments of diagrams he has added actors, who interact with the spaces. The work’s long takes and fixed camera positions recall structural films of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the materials and overall structure of film are the subject. As Untitled progresses, however, one notices mismatches between the constructed, illusory tableaux and the individuals in the film, who seem to inhabit a separate space and obey different codes of representation. Footage of two people having an inaudible conversation intensifies the film’s disorienting effect and shifts its emphasis from the nature of perception to the workings of individual subjectivity.