JERSEY CITY, NJ .- reMastered, Jac Lahav’s solo exhibition at Mana Contemporary, mines vinyl record collections to produce paintings of iconic record album covers that explore the emotional power of music, memory, and the act of artmaking.

Inspiration for these paintings began with Lahav’s diving into their own music collection. Lahav became fascinated with vinyl after discovering a Russian bootleg of Sonic Youth’s iconic 1988 album Daydream Nation with the artist Gerhard Richter’s painting Kerze (Candle) featured on the cover. Richter’s work confronts history through combining painting and photography. Likewise, Lahav’s work considers the back and forth dialogue of history through a 21st century lens, exploring the transaction of ideas in both our personal and collective past, capturing a momentary flicker in time.



Lahav’s Record Painting series, 12” x 12” paintings on canvas in Gouache and Acrylic, explores the sentimental realm of Lahav’s connection with music through their art practice, celebrating albums that have profoundly resonated with the artist and within all our collective consciousnesses. This unique intersection of personal experience, artistic expression, and collective memories fuel the multi-faceted transactions between audience and viewer in this exhibition. Lahav considers each album cover as a kind of icon, in the Russian Orthodox sense: a flattened image that points beyond itself to a sacred reality. The album cover is a surface, it is two-dimensional representation but beneath the surface it is four-dimensional, using “time” as a variable: Lahav’s work considers the album sleeve and also the music, the sound, and the time it occupied in our experience. However, the work continues into expanded memory triggers. Lahav recounts “Listening to Digital Underground in my car in high school. Losing my virginity to Elastica. My first Public Enemy tape, Fear of a Black Planet, gifted to me by my sister when I was twelve.” These memories are trench-deep, embedded in image, sound, and sensation.



The term “record album” is interesting. It comes from the idea of an album as a portfolio, a collection of bound sleeves, like a photo album or scrapbook. Album art, as we know it today, was only introduced in the late 1930s. Yet for many of us, especially those raised in the 1980s and before—album covers were treasure chests. In a pre-digital world, a new record wasn’t just about the music. It came with liner notes, photography, cryptic thank-you lists, and artwork that we studied late at night in our bedrooms. We memorized liner notes like sacred texts. It was the opposite of today’s infinite scroll. When you bought a record, you lived with it. To a certain generation, that connection has only deepened with age.

The exhibition at Mana Contemporary allows for interaction, giving audiences space to reflect on their personal connection with music. Woven into the show Mana Contemporary connects working artists with albums, highlighting an artist’s personal connection to music side by side with their work. The artist’s personal connection to albums allows for a unique way to connect with their work. Another feature supporting discovery and memory-triggering are record bins like those in every record store to allow anyone to “browse” through select works. This experience in real time allows for discovery perhaps of a detail in the painting you can hold in your hands or a new album to learn about. It also allows for triggering a memory of when record stores were the main sources of discovery and initial contact and album cover imagery was key to music’s visibility.



Lahav’s series is also a layered investigation of cultural memory, artistic authorship, and the shifting role of visual media. Each painting is a reproduction, yes, but also a transformation. Through gestures, texture, and style, Lahav explores what it means to paint something widely embraced and iconic, and how that process can reveal something deeply human.

The Mana Contemporary exhibition reMastered in part follows the artist’s connection and curiosity by exploring the record collections of iconic visual artists. Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Francis Bacon, Georgia O’Keeffe, Adrian Piper, Sol LeWitt, Karel Appel, and Dan Flavin were art history notables and noted music collectors. As Lahav says, “I’m fascinated by not only the artwork these artists made, but by what they listened to. What records did they own? What music filled their homes and studios?”
Lahav mines these artists' archives to discover what music they collected and listened to, collaborating with the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center and the Francis Bacon Estate to delve deeper into the connection between visual representation and music. The initial exploration was Jackson Pollock’s significant jazz collection. Pollock’s paintings have often been described as visual improvisations, and one can imagine Pollock flinging paint while listening to the improvisational bounce and expressive freedom of jazz. In Pollock’s case it may have been a memory connection to the music since in reality Pollock’s studio lacked any record player, their stereo kept in the main house he shared with his wife Lee Krasner. Even more surprising, today many of the 78s in Pollock and Krasner’s album collection don’t have illustrated sleeves; they were raw sound without the mediated layer of cover art. The collection also speaks legacy since most of the illustrated “record albums” found in this archive, in fact, belonged to Krasner purchased after Pollock’s death.



Captivated by the idea that visual culture and musical culture coexist, often silently. Lahav says “some of these artists, like Bacon or O’Keeffe—left behind physical records or detailed lists of their listening habits. Others, like Adrian Piper, simply pointed to time-stamped musical histories.” Whether or not these albums directly influenced palettes or compositions, their presence adds an important pin in the map of art history, allowing painters like Lahav to navigate forward and build new lexicons of cultural material.



Each of Lahav’s paintings carries the weight of nostalgia, music, and artistic expression, transporting viewers to an analog oasis in our digitally focused world. Our collective reliance on digital media and constant pixel-based visual input raises a question at the core of reMastered: why do artists still paint? What is the purpose of painting in a world saturated with instant perfect digital reproduction? Lahav answers this head-on ”In my studio, I approach this question through painterly means: thick daubs of acrylic paint, realist gouache, gestural charcoal mark-making, and sometimes absurd flourishes like strange figurative cats or eerily smooth monochromes. I treat each album as a visual puzzle, one that lets me explore the limits and freedoms of style. Over time, certain patterns in my work emerge. Not only stylistic signatures, but emotional rhythms. The act of analog reproduction becomes a method of self-discovery. Even when painting someone else's image, my voice comes through in the ways I alter, simplify, exaggerate, or reinvent visual language.” So, in an era of AI-generated images, when does it matter that something is artist-made and what value does the artist’s hand still carry? Lahav suggests “If an AI paints 200 record covers, we could eventually recognize patterns that suggest a "voice" of the machine. In contrast, the work in reMastered foregrounds uniquely human irregularities, hesitation, compulsion, emotion. These give art its soul."