In a word, Lasserre’s sculptures are heavy: both physically - in one piece, participants are invited to make music by dragging a three hundred pound table underlaid with piano strings across a concrete floor - and intellectually. A student of philosophy, Lasserre locates his work clearly outside of any art-historical context, though viewers will likely see a connection to Duchamp’s readymades. In person, Lasserre is thoughtful and articulate, with an artistic sensibility and sense of purpose that seems rare in someone so young. The work itself is impressive, resonant on a number of different levels: thematically, aesthetically, and often, logistically. In one piece, a stack of newspapers, compressed into a solid mass by a bun press found in an abandoned bakery, becomes the building block for a detailed carving of a human skeleton. From a distance, it is impossible to discern the materiality of the sculpture, but on closer inspection, the layers become visible, and the form takes on new meaning - speaking to the material necessity of the work and freeing it from any form of trickery or illusion.

Text by Stacey DeWolfe, from Akimbo

Fiction
tongue carved into the end-grain of fiction novels held together with a vice
7x9x44"
fiction novels, vice, powdered pigment
2007

For other images of works by Maskull Lasserre: http://images.google.ca/images?um=1&hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&tbs=isch%3A1&sa=3&q=maskull+lasserre&btnG=Search+images