Jason Lahr
Associate Professor, Painting and Drawing
Area Head, Painting and Drawing
Director of Graduate Studies
Area: Studio Art
Education
MFA, Penn State University
BFA, Clarion University
Research Interests
Painting, Narrative, Critical Theory, Text, Feminism, Masculinity, Digital and Screen Cultures
Biography
Jason Lahr is Associate Professor of Painting at the University of Notre Dame.
Lahr’s paintings combine darkly comic texts with appropriated images, creating shifting narratives of working-class male identity. The work draws from feminism, narrative theory, contemporary and postmodern fiction, semiotics, and film theory to explore the formation and shaping of masculinity through mass 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 form narratives which question the wash of expectations and assumptions we experience and create through popular culture.
His work has been written about by Art F City, NewCity, Beautiful Decay, Nashville Scene, Chicago Magazine, and Bad At Sports among others.
He is represented by Patrick Painter Inc. in Los Angeles, CA
