Brea Souders American, b. 1978

Brea Souders (b. 1978) works in photography, text, painting, collage and chemical process, often blending digital phenomena with physical objects. She shapes the physical materials that comprise the majority of her photographs to explore questions related to the human body, the psychological imprints of technology, autobiography and the natural world. Her redolent images are a canvas for her creative practice that has extended from sculptural montages for her Counterforms series, to a literal suspension of chance in her Film Electric project, to hand-painted photographs of AI-glitched human shadows in her Vistas project. Souders’ images are complex. Her works function as experiments, or a physical acting out of an abstract concept or layered subject——they balance between the literal and the figurative. Souders constructs visual “plays” on her ideas employing a particular palette and light-hearted tone that bely weighty consideration of essential human topics. Despite Souders’ preference for control over the creation of her images, her intuition is to always honor chance and the unknowable. She says of her work, “Illumination isn’t guaranteed.”

Souders’ work has been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions with Baxter St at CCNY, Bruce Silverstein Gallery and the Abrons Arts Center in New York, as well as the Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie, France and the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives, Canada. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Baxter St. Workspace Residency and Fellowship, and a 2020-21 Fellowship with the National Arts Club. Profiles and reviews of her work have been published in the New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Los Angeles Review of Books, i-D, ARTnews and The New Yorker. Her work is included in the survey publications Photography is Magic (Aperture), Feelings: Soft Art (Rizzoli), and the The Photograph as Contemporary Art (Thames & Hudson). She is the author of the books Another Online Pervert (MACK, 2023) and Brea Souders: eleven years (Saint Lucy Books, 2021) and is based in New York City.