Brea Souders first caught attention a few years ago with a photograph of a sunburn. While the facts of the situation are clear, the delicate coloration and artistic post-production make this image seem like a postcard memory of a day at the beach in Naples.

This week a solo show of her recent work opens at Bruce Silverstein Gallery, in New York. The show will feature images from her Counterforms series, visual riffs on her conceptual investigations, as well as works from her Film Electric project—a physical suspension of chance in which she photographs fragments of her negatives adhered with static-electricity to a plastic film sleeve.

Souders’ chosen subject matter includes personal effects and specific props that she arranges in pictorial space as a visual analogy for that which is described in her titles. Her works function as experiments—a physical acting out of an abstract concept or layered subject, they balance between the literal and the figurative. Souders often employs a particular palette and light-hearted tone that belies her consideration of weighty and essential topics.


Left to right: Under Water, 2012; Sunburn in Naples 2010; French Postcard, 2011. © Brea Souders.

As such, her Film Electric series playfully derives from an accidental occurrence in her studio, but hints at a conceptual overlay that turns her work into a visual referent for her own memories. As with memory, she writes of the work, “…certain slices come forward, and they intertwine with a lot of smaller sensory memories tied to color, light or shape. An entire day can be remembered as the way that the light caught someone’s hair, the particular pattern on a guitar strap, the shape of the moon that night, and so on”.

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.”

Opening reception, 6-8 pm: Brea Souders. Bruce Silverstein Gellery, 535 West 24^th Street, NY, NY.


© Brea Souders

Born in 1978 in Baltimore, Maryland, Brea Souders studied art at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Souders lives and works in New York City. Brea Souders has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, including Abrons Arts Center, the Camera Club of New York and the Center for Photography at Woodstock in New York, as well as the Hyères International Festival of Photography & Fashion, France, the Singapore International Photography Festival and the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives. She has received a Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation fellowship at the Millay Colony.