Jason is an established multi-disciplinary, award-winning artist with a 40-year arts practice. He is a stage designer who also creates immersive installation art. He is experienced in: Visual arts: Installation construction design and construction. Theatre & Tech: Lighting/Set Design and technical management. Theatre Choreography: Bouffon, stunt work, physical theatre. Puppetry: Design, construction, and performance. Photography, filming and sound recording. Jason has worked across art forms and mediums on local, national and international projects.

As a child, I used fantasy and invention to escape from a mostly boring, occasionally traumatic childhood. I created flying ghosts, flying saucers and other flights of fancy using whatever was close at hand. A wardrobe became a spaceship, a hallway became a camera obscura, and the backyard with all the animals became a circus.

Today I am an installation artist. I still make worlds where you start to question what you know or what you believe you know. I like to transform the known into the unknown and bring the unknown into close proximity. I want to stop you in your tracks. I want to surprise you. I want to make you laugh. I want to give you the shivers. But most of all I want to, just for a minute, make you think that there is something else going on.

My master’s project is a theatrical, multivalent installation that utilises material architecture, objects, rocks, video projection, sound and lighting. It is a work of speculative fiction that imagines what happens when the buried, forgotten past finds a way of returning to the present.

At the centre of this work is a site of an active eruption: ancient lithic forces are invading the inner sanctum of a colonial study/artist studio. As the title suggests, Things are not what they seem creates a space of uncanny uncertainty via multiple open narratives and temporalities.

Jason Lehane