Spreads from a portfolio I shot for L’Officiel Art, March issue.
The New Yorker
Goings On About Town: Art
John Mann and Brea Souders
Two photographers who take a playful approach to their medium make an entertaining pair. Mann turns colorful maps and globes into sly tabletop sculptures, which he photographs as if they were features of a miniaturized landscape: a road sign, a billboard, a spiralling off-ramp. His touch is light and poetic, with echoes of Joseph Cornell, and a similar blend of sophistication and childlike pleasure in materials. Souders scatters snippets of old negatives on shiny sheets of acetate, then photographs them as random collages—bright shards of color, some as wispy as blades of cut grass. Save for a few recognizable images, these are jazzy abstractions, funny and fresh. Through March 2.
Opening this week at Daniel Coney Fine Art, Film Electric, the gallery’s first exhibition of photographs by Brea Souders. By compiling discarded film, static electricity and strong light, the photographs touch on the artist’s personal history. Below, some more context to describe her process:
The images are created with shredded negatives from the artist’s archive attached to electrically charged sheets of acetate. Where the static force is strong, slices of film hold to the acetate. Where it is weak, they fall away. The acetate is then photographed using a flash, which reflects and creates streaks of white. This obscures some images while bringing others into relief. The reflected light also forms the photographs’ luminous internal frame. As appropriate to this process, the images’ final form exudes an element of playfulness and relies on the spirit of chance.
The show will be open January 24 - March 2. For more information, visit the gallery’s website here.
Peculiar Poetics, opening February 1st - February 23rd at Design Cloud Gallery, 118 N. Peoria St. 2N, Chicago, IL.
Film Electric at Daniel Cooney Fine Art
Brea Souders
Exhibition Dates: January 24 - March 2, 2013
Opening reception: January 24, 6-8pm
Daniel Cooney Fine Art is proud to announce our first exhibition of photographs by New York-based artist Brea Souders, titled Film Electric. Composed from discarded film, static electricity and strong light, the photographs are tapestries of the artist’s personal history. They contain slices of forgotten adventures, portraits of loved ones and strangers, untold experiments and family vacations, as well as shards of unrecognizable shapes and empty spaces—memories alongside their absence. Together, the charged fragments merge in energy and light to create a different, new, and compelling narrative.
The images are created with shredded negatives from the artist’s archive attached to electrically charged sheets of acetate. Where the static force is strong, slices of film hold to the acetate. Where it is weak, they fall away. The acetate is then photographed using a flash, which reflects and creates streaks of white. This obscures some images while bringing others into relief. The reflected light also forms the photographs’ luminous internal frame. As appropriate to this process, the images’ final form exudes an element of playfulness and relies on the spirit of chance.
Souders’ work has been exhibited at Abrons Arts Center, The Camera Club of New York, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Hyeres International Festival of Photography, France, Camera16 Contemporary Art, Milan, and the Singapore International Photography Festival. She has received a Darkroom Residency at the Camera Club and a fellowship at the Millay Colony. Her artwork has been featured in New York Magazine, Vice, Dear Dave and Creative Review, and she has photographed for the New York Times T Magazine, L’Officiel Art, Marie Claire and Bloomberg Businessweek.
Brea Souders’ exhibition runs concurrently with John Mann, Folded In Place.
Daniel Cooney Fine Art
508 - 526 West 26th Street, #9C
New York, NY 10001
Tel. 212.255.8158
Installation views of Fashionality, on view until October 27 at Camera16 Contemporary Art, Milan.
Images from the show in Rolling Stone and Vogue Italy.
Fashionality
Curated by Carlo Madesani and Francesca Spiller
13th September 2012 at 6.30 pm
14.09.2012 - 27.10.2012
tuesday - saturday / 3.00 pm - 7.00 pm
Camera16, via Pisacane 16, Milano
Fashionality is an exhibition, but first of all a research project, which aims to expand our usual narrow definition of fashion photography by opening it up to a wider range of images of personal style. Although the final purpose of fashion photography is to promote high-end style and beauty products, the works produced within this context, by its nature strongly commercial, often emerge as some of the most inspiring and interesting pictures in the international panorama of fine art photography. Fashion photography becomes a contemporary and versatile tool, perfect for representing thoughts, observations and comments on lifestyles, sentiments and emotions, lucid social criticism and aesthetic ideals. With no boundaries in terms of attitudes, artistic choices, techniques or processes, these photographers explore the current fashion imagery as a celebration of individuality, personal identity and self-expression. If they learned the lesson of the great masters who came before them, both on the intellectual and iconographic level, they look outside of the fence of fashion photography for inspiration. Some of the photographers in the exhibition are not commonly associated with fashion, however none of their photographs would look out of place in a fashion magazine. What emerges is a dense, surprising, diverse and innovative visual language, rich of references to art history, literature, digital media, but also to the street culture, sexuality and daily life. Fashionality, curated by Francesca Spiller and Carlo Madesani, presents images of significance by young photographers which seen together, may highlight the status of fashion contemporary photography. Photographers: Andrea Artemisio, Olga Cafiero, Luca De Santis, Les belles croix, Márton Perlaki, ScanderebechArt, Brea Souders
Several of my photographs will be shown in the exhibition Fashionality at Camera16 in Milan, from Thursday, September 13 - October 27. Opening reception at 6:30 on 9/13.
Sunburn in Naples is on the cover of Libération (France) today. Thanks to Maxime Clusel for the photo.
It's Nice That
Pritt Stick? Please. Brea Souders makes photo collages with electricity!
Any photographer that uses film will have have, at some point, been struck by how much more beautiful the negatives can be than the photo themselves – particularly the medium format variety. Brea Souders, whose work you may remember from that iconic Creative Review cover of the girl with the sunburnt back, has noticed the beauty in these cast-off negatives and embarked on a new project, using them to make some very striking collages.
These are not merely bits of aesthetic pleasure, the real fun lies in how each image is created – in a game of chance and electricity, overseen by Brea herself. “These images are made of cut-outs from my film archives, dating back 10 years. Pieces of positive and negative film are scattered onto sheets of acetate. Static electricity determines which pieces appear in the final image, as some fall to the ground and others cling to the surface.”
