The personal mixes with the surreal with the mythical in Brian Latham's artwork. Take, for example, his print Know You're No Remedy.
At first glance, it's a realistic scene. A boy sits on a stool in what's clearly a classroom. He wears a dunce cap and behind him is a chalkboard where he's been writing lines. "I will accept mediocrity," he's penned over and over again. Then things get stranger. A sea of hands point at him. Looking closely, the viewer can see that his stool is actually a wooden horse. Behind him towers a shadow, but it's not just darkness. Within it, the boy's inner self kneels in a field of flowers, picking some and placing them in a bucket, a crown of flowers floating above his head.
Lathan, 36, made the print's block for the Foundry Art Center's "block party" — where artists come together to print using a literal steamroller — and it came directly from his personal experiences as an art instructor and shop tech, and having colleagues and students second guess his every statement, often to the detriment of the print.
"There was always this element of, like, 'OK, I'll do it your way,'" he says. "I reference this idea of dismissing someone's expertise by making them out to be the odd one; this is why [the] figure sits in the center ... on a high horse."
Another of the St. Louis printmaker and sculptor's works depicts a boy whose head is half open; he's sipping a cup of lemonade, and within his open skull, a figure sits on the dock of a house raised on piles, fishing right into the same cup. In another, a man has a birdcage for a head, and he grasps for the bird, which radiates light. Each blends in an aspect of magical realism and seems to hold a whole story, dark or light, within it.
"There are these elements where you feel the spiritual aspect of the world," Lathan says. "I, ultimately, just want everyone to be able to be like, 'I feel this moment.'"
It is, indeed, easy to feel the moment while gazing at one of Lathan's works. That's thanks to the skill of the artist's craft but also his devotion to the field: Since dipping his toes into the art world, Lathan has never left, not even for a moment.
For Lathan, it all began when he was an artistic kid growing up in St. Louis and moving around from north city to south city to Midtown with his family. His interest and his skill seemed to belong to him and him alone. The only person in his family who was artistic was his father, and he was in prison while Lathan was growing up — though he'd sometimes send a handmade card with a cartoon character he'd drawn on it.
"I just kind of started drawing, and I really, really enjoyed it," Lathan recalls. "And then I kept drawing."
But it wasn't until Lathan got to Sumner High School that he had his eyes opened to the art world. For the first time, he had a dedicated art teacher who wasn't also an English or math instructor. And that teacher had all their students participate in the Pasta House Great Works of Art contest — where everyone reimagined an artwork to include pasta.
Lathan took on the Pietà, which depicts Mary holding the crucified Jesus on her lap. In his version, she was using a bowl of spaghetti to try to revive him.
"Weirdly, it wasn't bad," Lathan says. Then he got to the show and saw all the other work, in mediums that he didn't even know existed. "I think I was like, 'Oh, I could feel the coolness of the water, but I still had to dip my toe in.'"
That revelation brought on a bottomless hunger for art in Lathan. In turn, that propelled him to summer classes at Art Alliance and then to the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he studied art for a year before transferring to Saint Louis University.
He found another love in sculpture after graduating SLU. Determined to stay in the art world, he started taking classes at St. Louis Community College-Meramec as a sort of homemade post-college residency. There, a sculpture on campus propelled him into sculpture class, and he discovered that the 3D aspect of the media allowed him to "present a narrative moment from various perspectives and [that] can more playfully direct or misdirect viewers." He also began working as a shop tech in printmaking, and found that he liked teaching.
Earning his MFA at Southern Illinois University Carbondale helped Lathan develop the conceptual side of his practice and introduced him to mold making, which he views as an extension of printmaking.
But after graduating, Lathan didn't leave academia. Instead, he dove into teaching and still adjuncts at various schools around town while working out of his studio at the the Luminary on Cherokee, never leaving art behind for long.
"I'm just always thinking of what I would do, or I'm thinking of ideas," he says. "This is how my world is looking, and you might not see it. ... I feel like my job is to present the world back to itself and hope that people can relate or people get a new introduction to something that they missed."
Catch Brian Lathan's work in person through April 9 at the annual exhibition at the Angad Arts Hotel (3550 Samuel Shepard Drive), beginning January 26 in the final art faculty exhibition at Fontbonne (6800 Wydown Boulevard) or from February 1 to March 14 at the Contemporary Colors exhibit at the Kavanagh Gallery of Fine Line Creative Arts Center (37W570 Bolcum Road, St. Charles, Illinois). Find him online at blathan.myportfolio.com.
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