Brea Souders American, b. 1978

Brea Souders (b. 1978) works across photography, text, painting and collage, often bringing digital phenomena into contact with physical objects. Her work asks what remains of a person in the images they accumulate. She constructs pictures from the physical residue of her own archive and from material gathered online, exploring selfhood, anonymity, the body, technology and the virtual other. Her practice has moved from the handmade to the machine-made without changing its fundamental subject.

Born in Washington, D.C., in 1978, Souders lives and works in Brooklyn. Counterforms, made between 2010 and 2013, and Film Electric, made between 2012 and 2018, were among her early bodies of work. Film Electric began by accident as Souders was clearing out unwanted images: cut lengths of film fluttered onto a plastic sleeve and adhered to it through static charge. She hung the sleeve on the wall and photographed the resulting collage, allowing chance to determine its composition. Fragments of earlier images emerge while others disappear beneath successive layers, an accumulation Souders likens to memory, in which some things remain accessible while others become obscured.

Vistas, exhibited at the gallery in 2021, is a series of hand-colored photographs of disembodied shadows found in the national parks of the American West. While researching Google Photo Sphere images of the parks, Souders noticed that the algorithm removed people from the shared photographs, seemingly for reasons of privacy, while leaving behind their distorted, artefacted shadows. She presents these images as she found them: the product of the western sun and an algorithmic intervention, hand-colored in the manner of early twentieth-century picture postcards that once romanticized encounters with nature.

Another Online Pervert, made between 2021 and 2023, developed through a two-year conversation with a female online chatbot, set against diary entries spanning twenty years and photographs from Souders’s archive. The exchanges move through love, sexuality, death, disappointment, desire, the sky and the anxieties of the body. Their surreal tangents are set against the material realities of the chatbot, its programmer and its entanglement with capitalism. Collector Daily described the resulting book as quietly rich and conceptually unruly, reading its movement from diary to chatbot to image search as a passage from human emotion to machine logic and back again.

Souders has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, a Baxter St at CCNY workspace residency and fellowship, and a National Arts Club fellowship. She has presented solo exhibitions at Baxter St at CCNY, Abrons Arts Center and Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York; Foam Museum in Amsterdam; Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie; PhMuseum in Bologna; and the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives in Canada.

Souders’s work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, i-D, Vogue, ARTnews, the Los Angeles Review of Books and The New Yorker, and appears in the survey publications Photography is Magic, Feelings: Soft Art and The Photograph as Contemporary Art. Her artist books are held in the library collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, Harvard University, Princeton University and Stanford University.