The Exhibitions Hair and Sum of Limited Views make for an unusual pairing, however the juxtaposition of such highly particular work present a freeing and refreshing experience.
Elad Lassry, Israeli-born, Los Angeles based artist, exhibits his most recent collection of lacquered-framed photographic prints and 16mm films. Lassry’s jewel-box sized monographs encapsulate still-life arrangements of objects and images. These works not only convey Lassry’s nostalgic and highly realistic visual language, but also function as pieces that are not confined to their medium. Lassry’s photographs pose as sculptures as well as images. The gleaming lacquered frames that hold each monograph print emphasizes each captured image as a singular phenomenon within a three-dimensional world.
Richard Artschwager’s exhibition Hair in the second main gallery, exemplifies, in a much different way, art that is not confined by its medium. Artschwager’s sculptural oeuvre is familiar to us in its subject matter but unfamiliar in its peculiar process and materials. Rubberized horsehair, paint, Celotex, and Formica, the materials of a former furniture maker, are transmuted into a medium for Artschwager’s art practice. Requiring close inspection, the works bring awareness to their textural qualities. But from a distance, the forms assemble into clean images on the gallery’s white walls, unexpectedly yielding into their two-dimensional forms.
With such formal subversion, Artschwager and Lassry’s works activate an analogous set of visual and sensory responses that challenge classic modes of perception employed when encountering an art object. They bring to our attention the ways in which art objects are not confined by their mediums. They can exist in a more transitive state – right before the point of clear perception and lucid familiarity.