Elad Lassry @ David Kordansky

Lassry, notes the press release, “dismantles and democratizes standard […] hierarchies of subject matter”. Part and parcel of this dismantling act is a series of skillful, systematic contextual dislocations, which are most obvious in the intoxicating constellation of wooden, sculptures at the heart of this exhibition: oblong pieces that don’t rely on semi-amorphousness in their resistance of classifiability, but resist it by means of a resistance of semi-amorphousness itself—and thus call into question, I think, how we locate authentic non-conformism in sculpture today. If semi-amorphousness has been so ever-present in contemporary nonrepresentational sculpture that it’s generated a realm of rote homogeneity (a “world” in which each nonrepresentational sculpture refers, as a rule, less to itself than to abstract-sculpture-as-a-whole and abstract-sculpture-as-a-history) how can a nonrepresentational sculpture refer to itself and to reality foremost and only secondarily (if at all) to an abstract sculpture context which is now become all but utterly wrung of its honey? I think these bottle tree pod-like pieces by Lassry are a step in a correct direction, as they seem to me to make their own context, and them (oddly enough) to maim even it, as unapologetic agents of change. The press release likens them to flash-drives: “like hard drives or flash drives [they] become tangible metaphors for the collection and storage of pixels, situating a disembodied process in a physical space negotiated by embodied viewers.” This seems to me an apt description of the heart of the entire show; a show in which disembodied digital processes are carefully poured into analog “containers” for the purposes of a rich and pleasurable assessment that can only arise in a context so dislocated. Prior to Lassry’s generation of this context, our access to the processes behind these processes was far more limited w/r/t interaction. When the processes behind such processes appear in Lassry’s show, however, a radical contextual dislocation takes place at the very core of a collective contemplation of the contemporary. Lassry’s works here restrict the usual intensity of the processes’ sensorial impact, dislodging it to the surrounding sides, such that there is made a “soil” from which the riches revealed here can surface. Some exhibitions reveal themselves to me like nests of unexpected gems; intimate spaces full of animistic spirits half-hatched from the eggs of material arrangement by means of which they’re manifest. Here, however, the ambit of each piece’s enchantment power is relatively small, I’d say, but they become, taken collectively, a veritable coral reef of allure, in which the reality of pictorial power and potential is paramount.