Rat Hole Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new work by Elad Lassry. On view from May 26 until July 29, the exhibition features an installation of photography, 16mm film, and sculpture, and is the first time for the artist’s work to be shown in Japan.
Elad Lassry, who was born in 1977 in Tel Aviv and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, is known for his visually seductive yet detached, complex photographs and films that investigate the use of images in our visual culture, along with their inherent layers of histories and formalisms. By creating compositions and images that are simultaneously familiar and alien, both ever present and elusive, Lassry’s work explores current possibilities for the engagement with pictures and challenges the viewer with physical and perceptual paradoxes.
Lassry’s photographs reference a diversity of genres such as still life compositions, photocollages, studio portraits of friends and celebrities, and involve a broad range of image-making processes. The subjects in his works, which also canvas a wide range of everyday objects, people, animals, and landscapes, are placed within saturated fields of color and removed from their original context and history. Drawing on source material such as advertising, vintage picture magazines, illustrated books, and film archives, the resulting photographs are collages of pre-existing images or newly staged studio photographs in which the artist plays with the relationship between analog and digital methods of producing images. Lassry creates what he describes as a “nervous picture”- one that, according to the artist, “makes your faculties fail, when your comfort about having visual information or knowing the world is somehow shaken.” Further complicated by Lassry’s use of layered exposures, blurs, and harsh colors, the images slide between stillness and movement, and the viewer’s eye is never fixed. Lassry’s photographic works are made so that their dimensions never exceed the size of a magazine page, and the frames, which are painted with richly saturated colors that derive from the dominant hues in the photographs, also play a fundamental role. By allowing the viewer to consider the photographs as physical objects, Lassry raises the issue of whether the work’s existence is image-based or object-based, or whether it can be both, and opens up broader conceptual questions about the interaction between the tangible and cognitive experiences of a picture.
The relationship between image and object and the exploration of issues concerning the circulation and history of imageswithin a set of cultural referencesextends into Lassry’s film and sculpture as well. His film Untitled (Passacaglia), which will be shown with a 16mm projector in the exhibition, is based on inspiration from a 1966 documentary made for public television centeredon the 1938 choreography Passacaglia by revolutionary modern dance choreographer Doris Humphrey,and features penetrating images of New York City Ballet dancers against a set displaying a well-known painting by Robert Delaunay Tall Portuguese Women (1916). Noattempt is made to provide insight into dance choreography, a painting, a stage set or a story. Rather, Lassry’s use of the camera’sposition and movements which draw upon the legacy of Structuralist film, the indistinct space between abstraction and figuration, and the combination of flatness and depth, all serve to examine the process of seeing and the relationship between the seeing subject and the seen object.
For one of the sculptures that will be presented in the exhibition, Lassry has constructed a work resembling a small bed made from wood suggestive of the frame that often characterizes the artist’s photographs. Adorned with four crosses, the work simultaneously temps and denies a host of symbolic and functional interpretations, once again incorporating perceptual paradoxes that are seen in his photography and film work.Constantly shifting between original and found material, Lassry fosters a dialogue across photography, film, and sculpture, creating tension between an image and its physicality in space.
Lassry’s work was featured in ILLUMInations, the International Pavillion at the 54Venice Biennale last year and he was also recently nominated for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. Lassry has also exhibited extensively in major international institutions including solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and Tramway, Glasgow.
