“Michigan-based interdisciplinary artist Rachel Elise Thomas is driven by a deep desire to honor her past. “I am collaborating with memory, a spirit, and my environment,” she says about her series Crowded House, which engages with her relationship to her family home in the suburbs of Detroit, where she moved in 1993. Drawing from her experience with collage, Thomas uses photography and projection to produce palimpsests of image and memory. The approach is direct and powerful; Thomas projects 4-by-6-inch family photographs onto the rooms of her home, and then captures the result with a digital camera. These rooms serve as both a place and prompt for her memories—which include birthdays, holidays, and homecomings—and give her family archive a new, glowing physicality. In this way, the series enacts both a resurrection and a reexamination. “These memories perpetually overlap,” says Thomas, “and depending on the image’s placement, the composition changes, and so does its narrative.””

“Rachel Thomas’s University of Alabama (1965) and University of Louisville (1950s) highlights the very first black students to attend University (a predominantly white setting at the time), linking her own experiences in Higher Education to that of previous generations. Doctoring the vintage photos so that the black students are front and center, she highlights a moment in the not-so-distant past when black students were hardly present in these spaces, especially in the South.”