Elad Lassry

Elad Lassry messes with photographs in absurd, amusing and sometimes unsettling ways. As is evident in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 10-year survey of his work, he plays image against object, illusion against actuality, access against obstacle and desire against its inevitable frustration. Through both found photos and images that originate in his studio, he examines the formal strategies of commercial photography, from advertising and product shots to fashion and portraiture. He also asks us to consider the ways in which we perceive the photographic image and process its meaning. The apparent fact that, in titling his photo works and installing his exhibitions, he makes no distinction between what is appropriated and what is made suggests that for him both exist in the same realm of “picture making” and are subject to the same perceptual provocations and investigations. Three 16 mm films and four small, painted wooden sculptures—two of them riffing on children’s furniture, two others taking the form of wall-mounted cabinets—complement and slightly skew the photographic focus of the show.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1977 and based in Los Angeles since 1998, Lassry came of creative age in the new millennium. His is a generation, Jeff Wall writes in the exhibition catalogue, that regards the largescale, museum-oriented photographic tableaux of the 1980s (of the kind that made Wall internationally famous) as “conventional and institutionalized.” Lassry works small, repudiating the aspirational analogy between photography and history painting along with the phallocentric assertion that size matters. At the same time, his practice aims to establish the objecthood of the photo—or at least to investigate the place where image and object meet, conglomerated somewhere between illusion and material reality.

It is difficult, now, to trouble the photograph’s existence without invoking its digital ubiquity and without referencing “the culture of screens” that Wall remarks upon. Still, Lassry seems to be doing that, drawing the photo backwards in time, reclaiming it from its disembodied state in the digital universe of photo-storage apps and image-sharing websites. Most of his images are printed in a consistent size and format, directly related to the page size and format of the magazines that were the source of his early appropriations and the focus of his references. Wall reports that until about 2013, “Lassry’s work centered on [the] interrelation between appropriated and studio-made pictures,” but that since then, he has created few photographs in his studio. “The more recent pictures are all printed from negatives acquired from online sources.”

Whether found or made, Lassry’s images range across people (friends, models, movie stars), animals (cats, dogs, flamingos, giraffes), pool toys, knick-knacks and still-life arrangements of food. Such photos, found or made, are tightly and traditionally framed in carefully chosen materials—from shiny aluminum to brown-stained walnut, with a significant body of work in frames painted candy colours to match colours within the photo images. One obvious intention here is that the frame becomes an extension of the photograph, bestowing dimensionality along with materiality. Recently, Lassry has been encasing his images, together with stainless steel beads, plastic tubing and abstract sweeps of colour, in thick slabs of clear acrylic.

Many of Lassry’s early images enact a bond with their frames through the agency of colour, such as the weirdly bland double portrait, Women (055, 065), 2012, and Short Ribs, Eggs, from the same year. This latter work is a still life in which the raspberry red of four chunks of raw meat is reiterated in the raspberry red of the backdrop and the frame. This treatment seems to lodge image and frame, conceptually and satirically, in the realm of cheap “décor” products, at an extreme remove from the aspirations of “serious” photography. More recently, the framed photos have been subject to any number of material embellishments, interventions and occlusions. The artist may weave plastic tubing through the frame or sandwich the tubing between the glass and the photograph, or he may bind the whole in sumptuous silk. The silk may be flattened, pleated and wrapped tightly around the framed photo, obscuring half the image, or it may take the form of stuffed silk tubing, which is tied around the framed image, like a string around a parcel, although with soft and slouchy configurations of knots. Strips of coloured foil and rectangular pieces of carpet may also obscure aspects of the image essential to our full understanding of it.

In most instances, the embellishment contracts or confounds the image’s narrative possibilities while enlarging its material presence. In Untitled (Hair Curlers), however, there is the evocation of a sinister scenario—another narrative altogether. Thick strands of plastic- coated wire are attached to or extruded from the photographed face of a female model as she sits under a beauty salon-style hair dryer. The effect is disturbing, like a low-budget horror or sci-fi film. Torture? Mind control? Penetration by evil alien life forms? Although the model’s expression is one of perplexity rather than pain or horror, my reaction to this work was one of distress, as if witnessing an image of physical abuse. This response was oddly out of keeping with the rest of the exhibition, which otherwise provoked interest, curiosity and a worthwhile disruption of expectations.

By mating two-dimensional image to three-dimensional materiality and adding the element of rich colour and seductive fabric, Lassry presents the photo not only as material object but also as covetable material object. In this, we are reminded of the role of the advertising and fashion photograph as agent of desire. Fetishistic desire is explicit in Untitled (Boot A), 2013, in which a framed image of a woman’s high, lace-up boot is loosely tied—or perhaps bound— with thick, glossy silk tubing. It’s a fashion boot, not a dominatrix’s boot, but the suggestion is that, in advertising’s mating of material and sexual desire, the distinction hardly matters. In Silk Rope, 2010, executed and framed in mustard yellow (not gold), the knotted silk tubing is the straightforward subject of the photo rather than its material extension.

Lassry’s show evinces a particular interest in the late actor Anthony Perkins, who is the subject of a handful of appropriated images on view here. It seems we are meant to consider something about Perkins’s life as a closeted gay man in Hollywood in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s—but what, exactly? Or perhaps we are meant to draw a parallel between Perkins’s double life and that of the Norman Bates character he played in Psycho, meek and solicitous one moment, mad and murderous the next. This was the role, of course, that made him famous and, it can be argued, ruined his career.

“Elad Lassry” is the fifth exhibition co-curated by Wall and Vancouver Art Gallery director Kathleen Bartels. ❚

“Elad Lassry” was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery from June 24 to October 1, 2017.

Robin Laurence is a Vancouver-based writer, curator and contributing editor to Border Crossings.