Assistant Professor of Painting Jason Lahr will give a Visiting Artist lecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on Monday, November 11, 2013.
Professor Lahr’s talk will focus on a discussion of the conceptual, formal and process-based aspects of his paintings over the past 15 years. These 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.