Visual Arts — September 5, 2012 19:39 — 0 Comments

Christiana Latham

Our eyes open in the morning and our brains sift through the scattered remains of the dream world to find us in the fog like a child frantically running home after a fall.  What if, as the fog cleared, the clarity of our identity followed suit, showing up alongside consciousness to answer the eternal question of who and why we are.  How would we then get out of bed and put on our shoes?  This persistent quest is fundamental; it both defines and motivates us.

Christiana Latham tosses these questions both into the air and right at the viewer.  While it is obvious that she is searching for her identity, personal and cultural, she also questions ours by teasing us with people, places and role reversals.

In this reflection I can’t help but consider the life of Clive Wearing, a man who is stuck in this question.  Clive is a conductor and musician who suffers from acute anterograde and retrograde amnesia. Through a damaged hippocampus he was left unable to transfer short-term to long-term memory.  His memory lasts less than a minute.  His consciousness restarts over and over, every day, every 30 or so seconds.  This ongoing and unstopping search for self is silenced only by his art, for him music.  While conducting, he is like the child, desperately running home, even if just for a few fleeting moments.  His search is profound and like ours, it is unending.

-Visual Arts Editor, Liz McDonald

 


Background Switch
digital print
2012

Dancers
digital print
2012

Grandparents
digital print
2012

Little Memories
digital print
2012

Crossed Cultures
digital print
2012

Bio:

CROSSED CULTURES
Digital Prints 2012

Christiana Latham

Crossed Cultures is a series of digital photographs that speak about the artist’s cultural contrasts. Christiana Latham is both Aboriginal from Inuvik NT and English from Liverpool England. Having obtained photographs from both sides of her family, Miss Latham elected to explore this difference through photographic manipulation. Some of these British and Native subjects are taken from their backgrounds and switched to reveal their obvious differences, allowing the viewer to peer into their now altered worlds. Others entertain obvious differences in garb, time, and posture.

Artist Bio
Christiana Latham graduated in 2008 from The Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary Alberta, Canada, obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in Multimedia Arts and Design Technologies. Christiana has been collaborating with other artists, exhibiting her work in galleries and theaters as well as showing her films in film festivals worldwide. One of her latest achievements was the acceptance of her film “SpongeBob SquarePants” into GAMA at The EPCOR CENTRE for the Preforming Arts in Calgary Alberta, Canada. Various paintings and digital artworks have also been published in several magazines throughout Canada and The U.S.
Presently, Christiana Latham’s main artistic focus is on her films, employing her talents in video/film/animation, music, photography and digital artwork, utilizing each at her discretion. Christiana currently is director of Indigeneity Artist Collective Society and has been co presenting films with CSIF and DreamSpeakers Film Festival.

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The answer isn't poetry, but rather language

- Richard Kenney