Jake Lahah

Lives and works in Richmond, VA, USA

Artist statement

The core of my practice is centered on discourse regarding the intersections of queerness, labor, and environmental practices. My work challenges seemingly unlikely phenomenons and research topics, in a comparative analysis that questions our assumptions about the aesthetics, built-environments and the socio-political state of labor and queer bodies. I am most inspired by humanity’s ability to undermine the ways in which data, symbols, images, and texts serve as testimony of progress or knowledge–hiding in plain sight offering a glimpse of the human condition. My artistic intent is to aggregate this data to interrogate the psyche and political state of queer and blue collar folx. I push these ideas forward with a wide range of interdisciplinary mediums with a conceptual grounding in printmaking. Through material histories and theoretical practice, my work uses the marriage between substrate and image-technique as a moment of consciousness to the constructed image. This framework allows me to broaden my print sensibilities, allowing for a type of material formalism to challenge the narrative. Doing so allows for my desire and intuition to push my concepts abstractly through collage, layering, editing, color theory, and image-material formations.

Artwork