Printmaker | Designer | Educator | Learner
Info/Contact:
Email - jakelahah@gmail.com
Instagram - @jakelahah
Instagram - @jakelahah
Bio:
Jake Lahah is a print, craft, and sculpture based artist whose research examines how the built-environment and resource extraction often reveal aspects of labor, globalization, and the human conditions. His work uses data, abstraction, and visual language to reveal political underbellies of colonial systems of global supply chains. He received his BFA from George Mason University (2017) and an MFA in Print from Tyler School of Art + Architecture (2024). Some of the notable places that Lahah has shown include: ICA Baltimore, Baltimore, MD; Candela Books and Gallery, Richmond, VA; Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia, PA; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Page Bond Gallery, Richmond, VA; Attic 506, Chapel Hill, NC. He has been a resident artist at Studio Two Three, Richmond, VA and Zygote Press, Cleveland, OH. He is currently an Assistant Adjunct Professor of Foundations at Old Dominion University.
Statement:
My practice examines the relationship between built environments and the human condition, using the blurry space between perception and reality, redefine understands of ecology, environments, and architecture. I use collage, print, and material practices as metaphors for the construction, deconstructing, learning, and unlearning of how we think about global systems, climate change, and production. My work is often a gesture to decolonize the western mind to create new avenues for sustainable thinking around resources and labor.
Theoretically and in practice, my work prioritizes an investigation between image studies and its material condition. I’m traditionally trained in printmaking, but weave my experience in signage fabrication and rapid-prototyping with print and craft sensibilities. This leads me to using found, politicized, or industrial materials as support for drawing, print, images, and content. This becomes an act of destabilizing and queering materials, a process that encourages me to re-consider how an environment is constructed through physical matter and aesthetics. Doing so pushes my viewer to reconcile value and consequences through the material-image formations, a common process that is reflective of most image-production based industries.
Theoretically and in practice, my work prioritizes an investigation between image studies and its material condition. I’m traditionally trained in printmaking, but weave my experience in signage fabrication and rapid-prototyping with print and craft sensibilities. This leads me to using found, politicized, or industrial materials as support for drawing, print, images, and content. This becomes an act of destabilizing and queering materials, a process that encourages me to re-consider how an environment is constructed through physical matter and aesthetics. Doing so pushes my viewer to reconcile value and consequences through the material-image formations, a common process that is reflective of most image-production based industries.