CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/17/2014

Elad Lassry

"Selkirk Rex" (2012) is reproduced from Mousse Publishing's new release, Elad Lassry. Hammer Museum curator Aram Moshayedi writes, "The world we inhabit, the one not conveyed by Lassry's pictures, is populated by bodies that sweat, that leak fluids and shit; bodies that decay, that have acne and scars and stringy hair; bodies that quiver, that shake; bodies that smell and that carry a stench; bodies with razor burn and saggy skin, misshapen genitals and droopy asses; and, most importantly, bodies that make noise, that grunt and groan and strain. When they are at their glossiest, Lassry's images keep forces like these at bay, and this our greatest grievance: that we can never be as perfect as a picture or contain as much ghost-like elegance as a dancer on film. Taken one step further, it is the impossible silence of photographic images and of so-called "silent films" that makes this alienating experience all the more apparent. Collectively, we don't fit into the picture provided by the alienating quietness of most exhibitions, as our shoes scrape across a given concrete floor, our stomach grumbles, and our heavy breath gives away our age. The annoyance with ourselves is often most deafening when we are put on display by the performance of looking at an exhibition; and the scenes composed for Lassry's photographs, films, and by his architectural tableaux, are reminders of how inherently divorced we are from pictures, how difficult it is to penetrate and access picturehood in spite of the supposed visual literacy of our time."