Allan deSouza
dal 20/5/2005 al 15/7/2005
Segnalato da
20/5/2005
Allan deSouza
Talwar Gallery, New York
The Lost Pictures. Following his mother's death in 2003, the artist made prints of family slides of his own childhood that he exposed to the intimate wear and tear of daily life by placing them around his home in Los Angeles, including on the kitchen counter, bathroom floor, next to the sink and on a shower wall.
The Lost Pictures
Talwar Gallery is delighted to announce the exhibition of Allan
deSouza's new series of photoworks, The Lost Pictures. The exhibition
will open with an evening reception on Saturday, May 21th 6:00-8:00pm
and will be on view through July 15.
In the past, through foreboding cityscapes constructed of bodily and
domestic debris or framing diaspora via eerily desolate ports, Allan
deSouza has employed architecture as a vessel for systems of power. He
has consistently destabilized and chipped away at fixed narrative
structures and their role in the fabrication of identity.
The Lost Pictures is by far deSouza's most personal body of work to
date. Following his mother's death in 2003, deSouza made prints of
family slides of his own childhood that he exposed to the intimate wear
and tear of daily life by placing them around his home in Los Angeles,
including on the kitchen counter, bathroom floor, next to the sink and
on a shower wall. In these new works detritus simultaneously adheres to
and erases the image. As physical ephemera wash over and stain the
prints, layers of the original information are drained from the surface.
Alternately, the artist has painstakingly marked over his mother's
portraits, each mark sculpting his tribute while evoking her
remembrance.
By inviting the present to inscribe itself over the images of his past,
deSouza gives form to the allegorical link between photography and
memory, exposing how both are deformed and transformed by time,
collective narratives and the viewer/subject's cultural and temporal
perspective. By way of their mediated trajectory - printed and recopied,
etched and stained - the final works directly evoke the essence of loss;
delicately negotiated, however, with that which bears salvaging. In the
process of questioning the camera and our ability to hold onto any
moment in its original state, deSouza opens up a visual narrative space
in which the past and the present can potentially coexist.
Allan deSouza was born in 1958 in Nairobi, Kenya of Indian parents and
raised in England. He was educated at the Bath Academy of Art in
England and at Goldsmiths College in London. In 1992 he moved to the
United States and continued his education in Critical Studies at the
Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. In 1997 he received a
Master of Fine Arts from UCLA. deSouza's work has been exhibited in
group and solo exhibitions frequently across the US and England, as well
as in Canada, Germany, Portugal, South Korea and the Philippines. In New
York his works were included in Transforming the Crown at the Studio
Museum in Harlem in 1997 and in 2003 in Looking Both Ways at the Museum
of African Art in New York. In 2001 he was the Artist-in-residence at
Art in General, New York. In 2004 he had a solo exhibition, The Lost
Pictures at the Pomona College Museum of art in California and his works
were in Long steps never broke a back at the Philadelphia Museum of art.
His works are currently in Africa Remix at Hayward Gallery, London and
travel to Pompidou Center in Paris, France and Mori Art Museum in Tokyo,
Japan.
Allan deSouza lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with
essays by Eve Oishi and Allan deSouza.
Opening Reception and Preview, Saturday, May 21, 6-8 pm
Talwar Gallery
108 East 16 Street - New York