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Allan deSouza
Terrain #4, 1999
C-Print.16" x 20"
My work has mainly used the racialized and sexualized body as a template, partly to consider colonial relationships in their myriad configurations of exploration, discovery, desire and fear. In the last five years I have been mostly working in photo series, photographing public architectural spaces and landscapes, creating narratives about migration, return, nostalgia, and yearning. While suggesting autobiography, the work also uses strategies of fiction, masquerade and elusiveness in order to refute readings of authenticity.
The Terrain series consists of fabricated, table-top landscape models that have then been photographed. They transpose particular landscapes that I have visited, and experienced partly through their association with nationalist discourses, such as the South West deserts evoking mythologies of the frontier. They also refer obliquely to nineteenth-century American painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Church whose landscapes celebrated the sublime and the idyllic, as well as the patriotic, the masculine and expansionist. The Terrains resite landscape as a national(ist) projection of the racialized, gendered body, partly by their fabrication from-among other materials-bodily detritus such as hair, eyelashes and ear wax.
| Allan deSouza was born in Kenya and raised in England. He holds a BA (Hons) from Bath Academy of Art in England, an MFA in Photography from UCLA, and has participated in the Independent Study Program (Critical Studies) at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has exhibited extensively in Britain and in the US, including The Photographers Gallery, London; the Whitney Museum, NY; Queens Museum, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Miami; as well as Galeria Mitra, Lisbon; Vancouver Art Gallery and at the Third Havana Biennale, Cuba. His fiction and critical writings have appeared in various journals and anthologies. |
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