Elad Lassry

Elad Lassry (born 1977 in Tel Aviv, Israel) is an Israeli-American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles.

Lassry attended the California Institute of the Arts for film and visual art. He received his BFA from CalArts in 2003 and his MFA from the University of Southern California in 2007. At USC, his instructors included Sharon Lockhart and Frances Stark.

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.

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. 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. For a couple of traditional black-and-white gelatin silver-prints, the frames turn out to be silver.

Lassry often displays his photographs beside 16mm film projections in a continuous loop on the wall. 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. 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 — 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.

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