ANDERSON GALLERY

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.

 Jason Lahr was born and raised in rural Pennsylvania. He received his M.F.A. in drawing and painting from Penn State University and his B.F.A. in painting from Clarion University. He is represented by Patrick Painter Inc. in Los Angeles, CA. Lahr currently lives and works in South Bend, IN where he holds an Associate Professor of Painting position at the University of Notre Dame and oversees the MFA program in Studio & Design.