Sarah Hadley

Lost Venice

Feb 28, 2017- May 2, 2017

Reception April 7, 2017 6-8 PM

Sarah Hadley’s project, Lost Venice, articulates nostalgic memories and her long history with the city. For over 20 years, Hadley has photographed the architecture and landscapes of Venice, gathering photographs that not only show its overwhelming beauty, but also how she sees the life in Venice rapidly evolving as the foundations gradually crumble.

Hadley’s series, Lost Venice, will be on display in the Griffin’s satellite gallery, The Griffin@SoWa at 530 Harrison Ave from February 28 through May 2, 2017. A reception will take place on April 7th, 2017 from 6-8 PM.

Hadley explains, “I chose Venice because of my long history with the city- one that began when I was four years old in Boston, Massachusetts, and we moved to a house modeled on a Venetian Palace – the Gardner Museum. We lived in the Director’s apartment above it for most of my childhood and we traveled to Venice often, as it was a place my family loved. Years later, I was photographing there on a foggy November night and I saw a man that looked just like my father walking over a bridge and I felt as if I’d seen a ghost. The sadness in this work is about the loss of my father, who died suddenly when I was 25, and it is also my feelings about the loss of my childhood home, that Venetian Palace, and about the fragility and impermanence of things.”

Sarah Hadley tells Jim McKinniss of The Photo Exchange, “My current work revolves around the feeling of longing. I love to travel but want to be everywhere at once, even at home. I yearn for the past, yet love daydreaming about the future. I work in sepia and often blur the edges, both as a nod to antique photographs and as a way to draw more depth and feeling out of a black and white image. I want the places to seem dream-like and otherworldly, as if the place is both familiar and unknown.”

As a child, Hadley had an interesting introduction to art at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where her father was director. She spent 18 years surrounded by art in a Venetian palazzo. She studied both art history at Georgetown University and photography at the Corcoran College of Art. She then spent time living and working in Venice, Italy at the Guggenheim Museum and the Venice Biennale. Subsequently, she worked at the National Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress and as a photojournalist for a small town newspaper in Virginia. She then chose to move to Chicago, where she founded the Filter Photo Festival in 2009. Sarah Hadley has participated in many exhibitions, including: Fotofever (Paris), the Lishui Photo Festival (China), the Worldwide Photography Biennial (Buenos Aires) and the Ballarat Festival (Australia) and in galleries and museums around the US. She has been featured in many publications and online blogs including “B+W Magazine” (UK), “ArtTribune,” “Shots Magazine”, Lenscratch.com, and “F-Stop Magazine”. Hadley currently resides in Los Angeles.

The Griffin thanks GTI Properties and SoWa Boston for their continued support of the Griffin Museum in bringing this exhibit to the public.