StevieRay Latham (b.1992) is an artist and musician living and working between London and Devon.
Latham's paintings inhabit a liminal space; somewhere between dream and reality, imagination and memory, the world of the living and the world of the dead. Painting from images found in family photo albums, WhatsApp groups and folk archives, his paintings explore ideas of memory, historicity and trace; simulacra of spectres hidden within the layers of post-internet atemporality.
Interested in the disjuncture between memory and history, his practice questions the veracity of the archive by using painting as an interface where the indexical objectivity of photography and subjectivity of oral histories can coalesce; dichotomous mnemonic devices for cultural memory and family lore.
Created by a process of layering charcoal drawings, ink washes, acrylic and oil painting on top of each other, the painted surface becomes a prism for conversations across time and space with ancestors never met, exploring how the painting process can excavate stories and experiences from a substrata of forgotten memories.
