A growing cadre of young photographers, evidently responding to the Instagrammatic notion that everyone can be a photographer, is digging into the fundamentals of the medium to visualize ideas about art.

Last night a showing of works by Joseph Desler Costa opened at Foley Gallery, on the Lower East Side. Extreme Learning Machine, as the group of 25 or so images is titled, effectively reverse engineers the processes of digital imaging while creating real world proxies for human desires. 

Left: Sunkist Eclipse, 2015; right: Forty-five Forty-fives, 2015. © Joseph Desler Costa, courtesy Foley Gallery.

An image of an orange, made in camera, for example, is put through traditional photographic processes to become a solar eclipse posing as an advertising image for Florida’s best-known product, which has fallen increasingly under the threat of decimation by an insidious little bug. The natural product is finally given the most man-made possible of  treatments, finally executed as a shiny Duratrans light box.

The artist’s concerns surface through his eclectic choice of imagery to represent newer, better, shinier versions of the stuff that men desire: electric guitars, digital devices, cars, something a little stiff to drink, and music itself. While creating work that is laborious in its adherence to the light and chemistry of the medium, Costa allows the final product to assume surfaces as slick as the monitors on which most of today’s images are consumed.

Joseph Desler Costa | Extreme Learning Machine continues at Foley Gallery through November 28. 59 Orchard Street, NY, NY.

From a philosophically and temperamentally opposite position, Brea Souders, whose work goes on view next week at Bruce Silverstein Gallery, employs film as a canvas for her figurative explorations, and photographic chemicals as assault vehicles to disrupt them.

Souders adds bleach and watercolors to the mix to create portraits and abstract compositions that suggest the uncontrollable nature of time. At a moment when artists are grappling with our surrender to a digital world, Souders turns her attention to a fundamental aspect of the human experience: how we connect as individuals. 

Right: Man One, 2015. © Brea Souders, courtesy Bruce Silverstein Gallery

In these images, the nature of photography—the ability of the medium to express its essential foundation in time and representation—becomes a metaphor for the state of decline essential to the life cycle.  Sometimes humorous or quirky, a truncated figure, or a quizzical portrait, might recall the cartoon realism of Philip Guston, while a landscape titled Event Horizon might suggest that we’d better be watching out for The Big Meterorite. Throughout, the changeable nature inherent in her materials conveys a malleable state of transformation.

Brea Souders | Hole in the Curtain, opens Thursday, October 29, 6-8 pm at Bruce Silverstein Gallery. 535 West 24^th Street, NY, NY.