Elad lassry biography examples

Drawing on the look and feel of popular photographic forms such as magazine advertising or cinema stills, Elad Lassry blurs the distinction between newly shot studio images and the found material he gathers. The traditional genres of still life and portraiture are wittily reformatted into enigmatic and iconic works, consistent in their small scale and distinctive framing in plastic, timber and resin that extend the image itself into sculptural space. Flat colour backgrounds place Lassry’s subjects – whether people or objects – in a dance of free-floating signification. In a works such as Woman (Ball A), there is a sense of a catalogue advertising an unspecified product. The perception of the viewer is activated by images and textures that might be strangely familiar, but also offer a puzzle regarding meaning and intention.

In a world engulfed in images, it is fair to assume that most people today have become experts in reading photography. Then, every once in a while, someone comes along and shakes us into the realization that our daily intake of photography is disturbingly passive and uncritically accepting. For the past few years, few people have reminded us to keep our wits about us in front of a frame better than Tel Aviv-born, Los Angeles-based artist Elad Lassry.

Lassry&#;s early pieces—many of them hyperclear studio still lifes of objects ranging from ceramic figurines and nail-polish bottles to live hawks and vegetables, all shot in rich colors and held in bright, contrasting frames—were evocative precisely because, on first look, they seemed innocent and unaggressive. Many of his photographs echoed magazine ads or stock photos from previous decades, which the viewer&#;s mind picks up as neutral territory. But Lassry&#;s sly aesthetic takes hybrid forms, and those early images were only camouflaged as visual safety zones. Clea