Jason Lahr; assistant professor of painting; Department of Art, Art History, and Design
Lahr’s paintings combine darkly comic texts with appropriated images, creating shifting narratives of working-class male identity as influenced by popular culture. The images are pulled from a wide range of popular and sub-cultural ephemera, while the texts are fragments that suggest their excision from a larger story and give the reader/viewer flashbulb glimpses at moments of narrative action. Centering on female characters that occupy positions of authority and male characters who are injured, inept, defeated, or perplexed by their dealings with women, the texts and images combine to form narratives that question the wash of expectations and assumptions that we experience and create through popular culture.
Lahr’s talk will frame his work through the lens of Michael S. Kimmel’s Manhood in America and Robert Walser’s Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music.
Jason Lahr is an assistant professor of painting in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design at Notre Dame. He received his BFA in painting from Clarion University and his MFA in drawing and painting from Penn State University. He is represented by Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago. Lahr’s paintings, drawings, and installations integrate darkly comic texts with appropriated images in ever-shifting narratives of identity as constructed by popular culture. His work will be included in the CONTEXT pavilion at Art Miami in December 2012, and his solo exhibition Too Dumb for New York City, Too Ugly for L.A. will open in May 2013 at Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago.
For additional information, visit the gender studies website.