GHOST CHOIR

Solo Exhibition  

by Jason Lord 

January 13-24, 2026

Reception: Friday, Jan 23rd | 6-8P

More About Ghost Choir

GHOST CHOIR is the convergence of a recurring image in my work and a studio practice that embraces the alter ego as generative disruption.

In the winter of 1996, in a moment of intense emotion, a sound came through me. What began as a wail became an emanation connecting the earth's core, through me, to every star and planet. The sound was so old and so large I didn't even try to claim it as my own, even as a self-centered 23-year-old. The sound was not from me, but it came through me, connecting me to everything and everyone, everywhere.

In and out of my studio, I experiment with rules. Sometimes I use alter egos--embodied sets of rules--to push or disrupt certain predictable outcomes in my work. Each of these personae have a visual language and a mode of operation. This work is four of these studio personae--Otto, Santiago, Tammy, and Njezan--making sense of the sound that came through me all those years ago, performing its song in four-part harmony, conducted by me.

More About Jason 

Jason Lord is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and educator working in the American South. He grew up in a working-class, Catholic family in rural Vermont, where he inherited the experimental resourcefulness of the small town tinker, inventing and building objects, images, and worlds out of humble materials

He utilizes an expansive toolbox of materials, processes, and strategies for thinking and making, engaging in rigorous conceptual, material, and procedural experimentation through drawing, installation, painting, print, sculpture, assemblage, book arts, social practice, music composition and performance, writing, sound, video, photography, and their many intersections.

Jason has been the recipient of a McColl Center Residency, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, the Windgate Distinguished Fellowship for Innovation in Craft from the Hambidge Center, a Winter Residency Fellowship at Penland School of Craft, a North Carolina Arts Council Artist Support Grant, a CERF+ Grant, a National Gallery of Art Teaching Fellowship, and residencies at the Peter Bullough Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, LEVEL Retreat, and Pocosin Arts.  He has exhibited in numerous group and solo shows and taught classes and workshops to K-12 students, undergraduates, and adult learners in schools, museums, and art centers. He holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro.

Artist Statement

My work begins with close looking. I am drawn to the small, often overlooked moments where material, environment, and perception meet—shifts in light, the accumulation of marks, the fragile edges where one form becomes another. These moments become the raw material for a practice that moves between drawing, sculpture, installation, and other time-based processes. Across these modes, I explore the relationship between parts and wholes, the mutability of the self, and the ways identity is shaped by instability, memory, and environment.

I often build systems that underscore possibility and invite change: modular structures that reconfigure with each installation, drawings composed of repeated gestures that evolve over days or weeks, and cyanotypes or cast forms shaped by weather, light, or erosion. I investigate how meaning gathers over time, how fragments communicate with one another, and how an artwork can become a living record of attention.

Environmental and human ecologies inform much of my current research. I treat the studio, the field, and the classroom as interconnected sites of observation and experimentation. Small, everyday phenomena—shadow patterns in winter light, weather-worn surfaces, discarded fragments—become openings into larger questions about presence, change, and the construction of meaning. In this sense, my work is as much an inquiry into perception and attention as it is a material practice.

Ultimately, I aim to make work that activates curiosity and invites viewers to slow down and notice how the world is built: not all at once, but bit by bit, through relationships among parts, and through moments of fluctuation and renewal.