Hannah Latham
Kitchen Memories
December 3 - January 28, 2022
Hannah Latham is a recent graduate of Rhode Island School of Design’s Photography BFA program with a minor in race, gender, and sexuality studies. Her work investigates themes of memory, patriotism, and the environment in the form of cyanotypes or inkjet prints. Based in Boston, MA, she is an assistant at Gallery Kayafas and works with Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen. Hannah has done commercial work for Wire Magazine, among others.
Kitchen Memories, part of her thesis exhibition at RISD, is a series of eight cyanotype placemats and three embroidery hoops made from digital collages using photographs, documents, and objects from her maternal family archive. Each placemat represents a decade of her grandparents’ lives, starting with their childhood in Hungary, immigration to the United States, leading up until today. Newspaper clippings, patches, her Grandmother’s veil, album photographs, and love letters overlap to highlight the main familial events from each period. The collages were then exposed onto fabric treated with a cyanotype emulsion and surrounded by a border of machine-stitched motifs from traditional Hungarian embroidery particular to that decade. Telling a personal narrative of the American dream, this series aims to connect the nostalgia of one’s cultural identity with the food on their plate and their loved ones sitting around them.
Sanjé James
Familiar Interplay
September 10 – October 16, 2021
We are pleased to be exhibiting Sanjé James’ Familiar Interplay in the Alcove Gallery. The photographs, video, and installation represent James’ bedroom and her classroom during the Covid-19 pandemic. During her senior year at Lesley University, she took classes on zoom making most of her relationships virtual. Missing the contact and camaraderie she had for the past three years with classmates and professors, she hung images of her friends in her room to have them with her.
My friends and I are in a transition leaving adolescence and growing into adulthood. Through an unexpected haze of queries. Tangible interactions are obsolete. The act of hugging or walking closely with someone is now hazardous. Personable interactions are absent indefinitely. Therefore, platonic relationships are exclusively online. My childhood bedroom has turned into my stage where I perform my growing desire for the attention of others on social media. My friend’s portraits scattered throughout the room as my adored audience. Through mixed media, collage, and photography, my altered avatars flutter through the cloud for anyone to bear witness as I struggle to grow up into an adult in the unaccompanied space. Conversing with AI intelligence has become my new normal.
My life is encapsulated in my childhood bedroom with my friends watching me from the walls attempting to keep them close when they seem unattainable. Through their glossy non-blinking eyes, they observe me scramble across the internet with glaring blue lights in my eyes to find aspects of them in someone’s account. All that is left is my reflections on the screen embodying remixed versions of myself as entertainment. Amidst Alexa mispronounces my name and reports to me unprompted news. SJ 2021
Sanjé James is a twenty-three-year-old multimedia artist who focuses in photography. She received her BFA in Photography at Lesley Art + Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. James’ work is fueled by topics of race, class, and self-exploration. Through collage and video she layers culture’s influences on her generation and the complexity of being raised in a predominantly white suburb. James challenges her viewers to reflect on the past and the ever-changing way we view the world. This is her first gallery exhibition.