The Incomplete Guy Kit
Jason Lahr, Assistant Professor of Painting, Department of Art, Art History & 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 which question the wash of expectations and assumptions we experience and create through popular culture. His 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.
Selected Exhibitions include: Digital Error (solo), SoFA Gallery, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN; DEATHMETALHIPPIEKILLER (solo), Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, IL; Tectonic/Tapola/Lahr, SELLOUT Gallery, Minneapolis, MN; Open Source Deathmatch (solo), Soma Gallery, Fort Wayne, IN; Arrested Development, Saint Mary’s College, Notre Dame, IN; White Male, Packer Schopf Gallery, Chicago, IL; Bridge Art Fair, Packer Schopf Gallery, Miami, FL; Beastyfeast, Arlington Center for the Arts, Arlington, MA; A Knock at the Door, Cooper Union, New York, NY; Narrative, Cartoon, Zine, Strip Show; Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; Fort Wayne Biennial, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Fort Wayne, IN; As Small as Possible, Zg Gallery, Chicago, IL; Riding With Pike (solo), Fugitive Art Center, Nashville, TN; American Eyes, Gallery Eleven50, Atlanta, GA; Biennial 21, South Bend Regional Museum of Art, South Bend, IN; Culture of Class, Maryland Institute, College of Art, Baltimore, MD.
Jason Lahr is an Assistant Professor of Painting in the Department of Art, Art History & Design at Notre Dame. Jason Lahr received his B.F.A. in painting from Clarion University and his M.F.A. 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 LA will open in May 2013 at Packer Schopf Gallery in Chicago.
For additional information, please go to: Research Workshops