Zoo Award - 2007 Winner
2007 Winner
Elad Lassry was chosen as the winner of the John Jones Art on Paper Award for his silkscreen on magazine, paper composition ‘Eggsx52’
John Jones was delighted to host a special solo exhibition at Zoo Art Fair 2008, of new works by Elad Lassry, the award winner of the 2007 John Jones Art on Paper Award in their exhibition space at Zoo Art Fair.
After previously completing a BFA in Art/Film and Video at the California Institute of the Arts in 2003, Israeli born Elad Lassry completed an MFA in Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in 2007, and now lives and works in Los Angeles where he is represented by David Kordansky Gallery. Elad Lassry was chosen as the winner of the John Jones Art on Paper Award for his silkscreen on magazine, paper composition ‘Eggsx52’, by a panel comprising of artists Michael Craig-Martin and Danny Rolph, the Director of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Godfrey Worsdale, and Arts Editor of the Observer, Sarah Donaldson.
In an Artist Statement, Elad describes the starting point for both the conceptual and material process for his photographic works…..
‘The image starts with a subject, with a quest...that keeps getting "distracted" or taken back; sometimes through the exhausted nature of the photograph, an abstraction happens. When I use the word abstraction, I'm making a stretch, a metaphorical one, to a place when a portrait of a subject is no longer informing us of the subject, but gets saturated by the nature of the type of photograph it follows, or interacts with. It speaks better of its history than its subject, or doesn't it? When August Sanders was "mapping" the city with his typologies (portraits), the Nazi Regime banned the publication of these pictures. It seems like at the height of its modernist notion, the abilities of the portraits, of the "organization" of visual language became a threat. "Neue sachlichkeit" of the 1920's introduced the sharp focus and clear lighting as objective.” Since there are no distractions, a portrait must mean more....’
Lassry’s work is an investigation of both the impossibilities and possibilities that surround images. Through film installation, photography and found images, he culls interest in the histories, traditions and polemics of the picture – its perceptual qualities, independence, object hood, materiality, ubiquity and failure, as well as its joy and world like singularity.
What at first sight appears to be a sort of photographic or informational essay, reveals itself as a breakdown of the medium of image making. This process is a form of stripping down the photograph to its basic elements, using its own structure and concretion, as well as its archive and multiple histories to possibly interrogate recent phenomena
In her Guardian Blog, ‘Zoo is the fair with flair’ October 15th 2007, Sarah Donaldson described finding our winner as “the exciting sense of having stumbled on, as-yet-undeveloped, could-go-right-to-the-top, genius”. Sarah continued further to add, “His displayed works play with the conventions of western still life photography (in one, he inserts vegetation into the Hollywood Bowl, in another he uses a 1970s Life magazine portraits of a mother and child as the basis for a geometric silkscreen). They are poised, self-effacing, technically brilliant and elegantly coherent, despite their differing subjects. In 2008 as part of his prize, he will be given a mini-show at Zoo, displaying work made over the next 12 months. You sense he could move in any direction between now and then, and that is really exciting”.
As part of the Art on Paper Award, seven of Lassry’s works were acquired for the John Jones Collection. The solo exhibition represents a key element of John Jones’ support and demonstrates the significance of the company’s commitment in supporting innovative art and a new generation of artists at Zoo Art Fair.
Our thanks to the 2007 selection panel:
Michael Craig-Martin, artist
Sarah Donaldson Arts Editor of the Observer
Godfrey Worsdale, Director of MIMA
Danny Rolph, artist
Exhibition Images
