The photographic and filmic works of Elad Lassry seek neutral visual and formal high ground from the various histories and institutions responsible for their origins. Liberated from these processes, Lassry’s autonomous specimens—human and animal portraits, fruit and vegetable still lifes, landscapes and everyday objects—breach the possibility of a singular viewing by criticizing the frames, both durational and compositional, of seeing. While his sources of interest range from Hollywood film stills and publicity shots to textbooks and mass-distributed print media, the emphasis lies in their overlap and the canonical ideas that emerge in their imagery. The work applies the aesthetics of Pop Art and Minimalism to Structuralist approaches in the re-staging, masking and cropping of established cultural forms. Whether manipulated found materials or carefully staged studio works, the images behave as open-ended questions on their own origination. Each is theatrically framed so as to address issues of scale in print and media, foreground and background, and a photograph’s sculptural and perceptual immediacy. These typological concerns have as much to do with the demonstrative style of early scientific photography as they do with Lassry’s own delineations into what constitutes something, for example a blonde (Blonde Girl). These tensions are apparent when viewing one of his 16mm film projections amidst a line of similarly sized 11x14 inch photographs. In film, fixed camera frames and long takes propose a photographic rigidity, where the still images pulsate with colour tricks and ghostlike exposures. Whether forced to resolve one of Lassry’s optical puzzles or to follow the pattern of an animal’s stripes, both film and photograph function to destabilize notions of stillness and a fixed viewing.