NEW YORK, NY.- A boundary-straddling artist whose work problematizing the notion of a picture has carved out new dimensions in photographic discourse, Lassry creates interruptions in evaluating images and objects. Referring to his pictures as "units," his works establish and aggregate an archival syntax that pushes photographs into other things, a destabilization where each specific picture is both present and absent and simultaneously implicates other proposals.

Lassry's photographs exist in the realm of suggestion, where every possibility of intersection is valid, where the ghost of one system posits the limitations of the next. His oscillating relationship to the photographic registry often places the image between two delicate tensions - one of eerie familiarity and presence and the other of utility and function, acknowledging the photograph's position as part of a defined industry, system, and history. Lassry sets the picture up to fail, allowing the image to evaporate inside its apparent substantiality in order to claim meaning. From an unassigned fashion shoot to a reef fish supply facility, Lassry’s photographs are shot on an almost extinct technology (8 “x 10” camera). The artist thus combines analogue technology with the dematerialization of the image, an anxiety-provoking phenomenon whereby the image is deprived of its physical qualities and becomes omnipresent in the form of data. By confining his efforts to the figurative, Lassry invites the viewer to reconsider the known, to ask what else the image can be, and to participate in an almost absurd game of elimination: imagining what the picture is not.

Using the conventions of the photographic assignment as a structuralist framework, Lassry pursues an invitation that never took place, as if it were an invitation by an imaginary client. He assumes the part of a photographer in a professional undertaking: on a fashion campaign, in a photojournalistic-like task of visiting a site to illustrate an as yet unwritten article. Through a participatory quality, these works subvert the original meaning behind making them.

Lassry's work questions whether a picture can have dimension, whether an object can be flat. In Photoshop, flattening an image is the final step before printing, a collapsing of layers into one plane. This counterintuitive gesture can be seen reclaimed in Lassry's work. As images have proliferated beyond comprehension, as doubt has been sown into the veracity of any picture, Lassry proposes that each layer suggests another layer, that images should become objects while reality and representation become more aleatory.