Elad Lassry

The Vancouver Art Gallery is pleased to present Los Angeles-based artist Elad Lassry’s first major exhibition in Canada, on view from June 24 to October 1, 2017. Investigating the nature of perception with a special focus on the photographic image within the digital era, the exhibition includes more than seventy works—films, photographs and sculpture—produced by Lassry over the last decade.

“Lassry is among a generation of younger photographers working conceptually and over the last decade his thoughtful investigation of the representational image has actively shaped conversations around photography. These conversations continue to be important to Vancouver artists and audiences, and we are therefore immensely pleased to present Elad Lassry and celebrate this significant contemporary artist,” says Kathleen S. Bartels, Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery and co-curator.

Lassry’s thoughtful analysis of “pictures” involves carefully-created studio portraits and still lifes, as well as altered found photos, which often draw upon conventions of advertising, fashion and product photography. Lassry’s conscious staging, his subtle interventions and his conceptual, sometimes theatrical, elaborations of the photographs are designed to refocus our attention on the content of images, and the complexity of what occurs within the frame. Some of his photographs are adorned with elements such as silk fabric that encase them, guiding viewers to engage with photographs in a more meaningful way.

Lassry himself has remarked, “I don’t think of them as photographs. I think of them as objects. I think of them as something that is suspended between sculpture and an image.”

Elad Lassry also looks at ways in which photographs gain personal meaning and significance as they circulate, exploring the fundamental ambiguity of the photographic image and the role of memory in shaping how we come to understand images.

“With his work bringing together cinema, sculpture, dematerialized, appropriated and repurposed imagery, Lassry is exemplary in the restlessness that shimmers within his various modes,” says Jeff Wall, artist and co-curator. “His almost kaleidoscopic oeuvre is the work of a still-young artist on his way to somewhere yet unknown and at the same time a model response to this period of cultural continental drift.”

Born in Tel Aviv, Lassry moved to Los Angeles in 1998 to study film and photography at the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Southern California. It was during this period, a point in time when digital-sharing sites and blogs were popular, phones became cameras and social media platforms emerged as the dominant means of uploading and sharing images, that Lassry first began his intensive exploration of the nature of representation.

Organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery and co-curated by Kathleen S. Bartels, Director and artist Jeff Wall.