Allan deSouza
Allan deSouza, Fountain, from the series The Lost Pictures, 2004 © Allan deSouza, Courtesy the artist and Talwar Gallery, New York
You can find the above work by deSouza at the Snap Judgments exhibition at the ICP in New York City. The exhibition ends on May 28.
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.
The aesthetic principle underlying this project might best be explained by borrowing deSouza’s words offered in a more general context: “While suggesting autobiography, the work also uses strategies of fiction, masquerade and elusiveness in order to refute readings of authenticity.”
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.
