Elad Lassry

Artist lecture Thursday, April 12, 2018 7PM
Timken Lecture Hall, California College of the Arts, 1111 Eighth Street, San Francisco CA, 94107
Elad Lassry, Untitled (Eggs), 2013.

Israeli-born Elad Lassry defines his practice as consumed with “pictures”—generic images gathered from vintage picture magazines and film archives. He mines the visual culture of still and motion pictures, engaging traditions of story-building with images and the ghosts of history that linger with images long after they have been withdrawn from their original contexts.

Lassry challenges the means by which a work is structured visually. His pictures—still lifes, photocollages, and studio portraits of friends and celebrities—never exceed the dimensions of a magazine page or spread and are displayed in frames that take their colors from the dominant hues in the photographs. Lassry’s pictures are created from his own studio-based photographs as well as appropriated imagery. Though his use of pop-culture subject matter makes his works appear as straightforward as commercial photography, they are often more complex, comprised of double exposures, blurs, or the superimposition of multiple negatives. By positioning his photographic works as entities that operate simultaneously as objects and images, he shifts viewers’ relationships to these artworks and invites a broader examination of how photographs are seen and understood.

Lassry received his BFA from California Institute of the Arts, Valencia and MFA the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He has exhibited widely at institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Zürich; and Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan. Lassry lives and works in Los Angeles.


Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program

Pier 24 Photography is pleased to present the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program in collaboration with California College of the Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Each year, the Larry Sultan Visiting Artist Program brings six photographers, writers, and curators to San Francisco to offer free and open lectures, and to work one-on-one with students at California College of the Arts.


Larry Sultan Photography Award


Jonathan Calm, Double Vision (Recording I), 2018

Jonathan Calm

Fall 2019 Residency
Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA

Click HERE for more information on the Larry Sultan Photography Award

Jonathan Calm is a visual artist who works in photography, video, installation, and performance. A central theme of his work is the relationship between photography and urban architecture, and the powerful role of images in the way architectural constructs shape the lives of individuals and communities.

In his most recent work, Calm explores the complex representation of African-American automobility from a historical and contemporary perspective, focusing and drawing on the importance and resonance of the Negro Motorist Green Book. Of this project, he explains, “the image of the infinite highway and the unbridled freedom to roam the land has always been considered a quintessential expression of the modern American spirit, but the black American experience of travel, which involves heightened subjectivity and exposure, has to this day proven a precarious privilege rather than an inalienable right.”

Calm’s art practice is international in scope and has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Frequency at the Studio Museum in Harlem (2005); Role Play at the Tate Britain (2006); Black Is, Black Ain’t at the University of Chicago’s Renaissance Society (2008); Streetwise at the Reina Sophia Museum in Madrid (2008) and the Chelsea Art Museum (2011); deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum (2013); and Rooted Movements at LMAKprojects in New York City (2014). Calm currently lives in Palo Alto, CA where he is a faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University.