Cherry and Martin presents its debut exhibition of Israeli-born, Los Angeles-based artist Elad Lassry’s filmic and photographic work.

The exhibition opens at Cherry and Martin on November 3, 2007 and runs through December 15, 2007.
The opening reception is Saturday, November 3, 2007 from 6-9pm.

Elad Lassry’s unexpected pictures make the marginalized relevant and the strange familiar. Proposing a dialogue between moving pictures and still ones, Lassry looks beyond the canonical language of documentary expression, creating charged images inflected with all the complications of picture making, its multiple histories and formalisms.

In his 16mm films, Lassry strips down cinematographic action to the associations between individual people, places and things. His filmic work foregrounds the placement of the actors, the lapse of time and the movement of the camera. Using a vocabulary based in Structuralist film, Lassry reflects on the medium’s place within the art-making tradition, its day-to-day Hollywood reality and single-frame foundation.

Lassry’s photographs play on such conventions as the still life, the family portrait and the headshot. When using images taken directly from other sources, appropriation is used as a means, rather than an end. In a still work like Joanne and Trace (2007), Lassry co-opts Life Magazine’s ‘Amateur Faces’ First Prize winning photo for 1970—“ When Kent Barton, a 28-year-old North Miami art director, couldn't get his 3-month-old son Trace to sit properly for a formal portrait, he asked his wife Joanne to help, and made this picture.” Lassry uses the image to juxtapose the swoop of the mother’s nude, tan-lined body against the stoic geometry of silk-screened forms. Here Lassry addresses a topic—that of mother and child—so exhausted that any mother and any baby, not just Joanne and Trace, would serve its purposes. What emerges is something less iconic, an image that meditates on visual connections, imagistic tropes and the indexical aspects that can enter photographic presentation.

Elad Lassry’s work has been seen in group exhibitions at the Sweeney Art Gallery, Riverside, CA, and the 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica, CA. His work has been reviewed in such publications as ArtForum and the Los Angeles Times. Lassry received his MFA from the University of Southern California and his BFA from the California Institute for the Arts.