November 26, 2011 |
Make-up, ballet, exotic fruit, well-groomed pets and their well-groomed owners. Playing with the language of commercial photography, the Israeli, LA-based young artist’s works have included everything from fluffy kittens to rippling male torsos, ripe papaya and, in one well-known picture, five rosy lipsticks standing proud on plinths. Sometimes these are fresh shots created in the studio, sometimes they’re images found in old magazines. Whatever their origins, though, Lassry makes us see his pictures with fresh eyes.
He takes what might seem stale, overfamiliar images and cuts them adrift against lush, even garishly coloured, backdrops matched to the photos frames. His investigation of photography’s ongoing potential to surprise won him a nomination for the coveted Deutsche Börse prize earlier this year, while his first major show at London’s foremost home-grown blue chip gallery, White Cube, opens this month.
You’ve said there’s no such thing as a good or bad picture in your work, but pleasure, or perhaps seduction, seems a very important quality. What makes a picture pleasurable for you?
“That is quite a complex statement I had made… Indeed, I don’t think there is such a thing as a good or bad photograph, or perhaps to be fair, in my experience of photographic representation, good or bad isn’t of interest. I look at photographic information with a sense of abstraction. This could actually come from a great love and passion for photographs. In relation to seduction and pleasure, I might have a repressed relationship to seduction. Often I think I’m making a work that is rather ugly and surprised to hear people talk about pleasure. Some colour I use I find attractive based on repulsion.
Are you interested in class or the aspirations photography embodies?
“As I’m very interested in investigating pictures that we experience collectively, I certainly consider class. Signifiers of class are surprisingly easily destabilised in representation. Yet, while class is a dense subject that I embrace in the work, I’m not searching to comment on it or provide solutions, but to reflect.”
You have worked with some recognisable faces, figures whose fame perhaps unbalances things. What made you want to work with Radha Mitchell and then Eric Stoltz?
“The idea of using working actors has to do with accepting the economies and institutions behind the construction of an image. In a way, I wish viewers would recognise the actor from a different work, then be able to divorce them from that context. I have no interest in working with celebrities – the actors I work with are familiar, but mostly as actors. My work attempts to suspend and abstract the subject, and using a movie actor adds an obstacle – they come with a mediated history.”
What artists have been important for you?
“I can name two great teachers, brilliant minds and fantastic artists – Sharon Lockhart and Frances Stark. Both shaped my thinking in graduate school here in LA.”
Elad Lassry’s solo exhibition, Sep 23-Nov 12; White Cube, Hoxton Square, N1
by Skye Sherwin
