Elad Lassry, 2015; installation view. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

The black-and-white images found in Lassry’s series of sculptural photographs are taken from commercial photo shoots. The context of each photograph is deliberately withheld, with ranging subjects that include black fashion models, as depicted in Untitled (Woman B) (2015); a set of water glasses on a tray, and industrial parts, in Untitled (Engine 2) (2015), and scientific studies, as in Untitled (Rattlesnake A) (2015). The works center on a dual and seemingly contradictory assertion that “pictures do not exist until the information within them is framed, captured, and introduced into a new, separate system,” as the exhibition’s printed statement puts it—a claim to an image’s lack of an autonomous ability to convey meaning that Lassry’s addition of color and objects is oxymoronically meant to disrupt.

Elad Lassry. Untitled (Woman), 2015; acrylic glass, silver gelatin print, wire, steel ball, pigment; 23 1/8 x 17 1/4 x 1 5/8 in. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

Lassry’s insistent swirls of colored paint and other materials onto these selected images is a conflicted half-attempt at reducing the works to mere signs of photographs. The arbitrary gestures of paint seem to be produced by a set of exercises that tells the idea of “context” as much as shows it, through a set of processes that are simple and schematic. The results, however, feel like an all-too-elaborate effort to remind viewers that a “picture” is always made from and within its context. The mild curiosity evoked in any individual piece—through the removal of the image’s context or the addition of disjunctive sculptural elements—lessens over the spread of dozens of such procedurally made work. Perhaps if the images themselves held more intrinsic charm, the deliberate eliding or withholding of their context might feed that aura, which Lassry’s work asserts as a(n unknowable) presence.

Elad Lassry. Untitled (Folk Dance), 2015 (detail); silver gelatin print, carpet, walnut frame; 11 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

Some of Lassry’s earlier photographic interventions have been more effective when more heavy-handed. His application of thick vinyl onto the surface of the frame, and his use of saturated color materials to obscure portions of images, significantly comment on the photographic images underneath. The most compelling piece, among the current show, functions somewhat along these lines. Untitled (Folk Dance) (2015) is a silver gelatin print depicting the leaping legs of a small group of men, clad in sneakers and white pants. The upper halves of their bodies are overlaid with a swatch of cheap, thick shag carpet, set within a walnut frame. This action, however, does little to salvage the freak-show fetishization within other undisrupted works, such as the image of an anonymously manhandled rattlesnake. The exhibition statement makes an oddly obvious observation, pointing out that “the snake lacks the cognitive capacity to make a good portrait.”

Elad Lassry. Untitled (Rattlesnake B), 2015; silver gelatin print, walnut frame; 14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

The accompanying series of large carved and polished wooden ovoid sculptures fall somewhere in between the form of oversized picnic baskets and half-shaped logs. The flat-leveled surface of each sculpture is embossed with the imprint of six to eight colorfully painted shapes, which suggest different types of fruits and vegetables in caricatured form. The wood has been worked on so finely that it elicits a shiny, polished surface that is almost unnatural. Both the refinement and somewhat outsize scale of the pieces contrast greatly with the excessively bright figure-markings of fruit on their surface.

The works create an intriguing tension around the questions of using so much material for these nonfunctional objects that masquerade in the form of almost utilitarian objects. That tension unfortunately gets overloaded with pressure from claims within the exhibition statement, which compare the sculptures to computer hard drives containing informational aspects of image in the digital age. The chain of abstract shifts—from the physical presence and weight of the sculptural forms to the idea of disembodied bits and pixels—is too attenuated to bear the burden of this conceptual apparatus. Such a leap is especially puzzling after the same statement’s insistence that Lassry’s choice of “analog” materials is meant to avoid “the ubiquitous digital references that abound in contemporary art.”

Elad Lassry. Untitled (Carrier, Carrots), 2015; Claro walnut, paint, varnish; 48 x 20 x 16 in. Courtesy of David Kordansky Gallery. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen.

The speculative possibilities of coming upon this group of tooled objects themselves is more rewarding. The sculptures seem to be contrived for an unknowable and/or failed purpose, finished and decorated with an incomprehensible whimsy, and only partially manage to unsettle the heaviness and the finish themselves.

Elad Lassry is on view at David Kordansky Gallery in Los Angeles through November 5, 2015.

Beverly Buchanan. Old Colored School, 2010; wood and paint; 20.25 x 14.75 x 18.5 in. (51.4 x 37.5 x 47 cm). Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

Buchanan’s unique perspective was nurtured through studies with Norman Lewis and Romare Bearden at the Art Students League, and her work has been shown and collected by some significant cultural institutions. Nonetheless, her work has been seen only sporadically in the past decade and a half, mostly in regional art centers. So her inclusion in a 2014 group show at the Studio Museum was in some way an unveiling to a larger public, and now a selection of her works, ranging in date from 1987 to 2012, is on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery.

Edlin has specialized in showing work by artists ranging from the classic position of outsider—socially isolated or low-functioning individuals, such as the now-celebrated Henry Darger and the less-known yet ineffable Charles Steffen—to highly educated and accomplished fine artists such as Victor Moscoso and Chris Doyle; in between are creative practitioners such as Brent Green and Buchanan, who work more roughly or idiosyncratically.

Beverly Buchanan. Still Life House, 2008; foam core, acrylic paint; 9.25 x 8 x 9 in. (23.5 x 20.3 x 22.9 cm). Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

Visitors to Buchanan’s show are greeted with a series of seven midsize works of pastel on paper; the largest is Barber Street (1995). The drawings are hung evenly in a line along one wall of a narrow corridor, leading to a well-lit, airy back room that houses eleven small sculptures of various sizes. The smallest, Still Life House (2008), is made of foam core and acrylic, atypical materials for the artist.

Beverly Buchanan. Barber Street, 1995; oil pastel on paper; 25.5 x 38 in. (64.8 x 96.5 cm). Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

The sculptures are primarily made of smaller strips of wood of irregular sizes, mostly unpainted. The entirety is gathered together in a smart yet seemingly casual way on one large plinth in the back room, as if a residential community had been formed by the simple accumulation of individual houses and outbuildings. This shared field of presentation makes each sculpture—though somewhat precarious or contingent in material and construction—feel both less pathetic and less precious than if each was isolated on its own shelf or podium or under a vitrine.

The obvious care with which they were constructed belies the description of ramshackle that might be a default for many initial viewings of the models (and the houses or other buildings that might have inspired them). Buchanan states that her sculptures are not reproductions, though the specificity of many of their forms, and especially their titles, suggest that the artist was inspired by particular examples of “offbeat architecture” in the real world, as she calls them.

Beverly Buchanan. My Shed, 2009; wood and metal; 9.75 x 16 x 8 in. (24.8 x 40.6 x 20.3 cm). Courtesy of Andrew Edlin Gallery.

The titles are simultaneously plain-spoken and evocative, whether in quotation or description of general appearance, location, style, or use (for example: Preacher’s Room, Cook’s Shack, Keep Out, My Shed, Modern House 2). More important for the artist than any verisimilitude in emulating real-world models, it would seem, is the larger idea of the choices that make actual buildings both physical and sentimental bases for humans. Buchanan has long referred to the idea of “groundings” in her process of “creating objects that relate to … houses mainly lived in now or abandoned that served as home or an emotional grounding.”[1]

Buchanan’s occasional use of plastic as windowpanes seems a deliberate choice, to stay in the realm of the model. The addition of small plates of slightly worn copper on a few of the sculptures proposes another abstraction: that of construction material’s worth, not only in monetary value but also in its ability to conduct electricity—a different allusion to the grounding notion.

In contrast to the plainness of most of the house sculptures (though a handful have also been painted), the drawings are bright and multicolored. In the two-dimensional works, most striking is the way that the areas of flora and skies surround the central houses in wide arrays of saturated color, in a manner that suggests late Impressionism as much or more than the realism or expressionism favored by some of Buchanan’s mentors at the Art Students League. Such treatments bring the lone buildings in the drawn images—which seem, as in the sculptural versions, somewhat isolated yet defiantly not forlorn—back into the context of a larger world.

Beverly Buchanan: And You May Find Yourself… is on view at Andrew Edlin Gallery through June 13, 2015.

[1] Beverly Buchanan, “Statement,” accessed June 8, 2015, at http://beverlybuchanan.com/about/statement/.