SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- EUQINOM Gallery announces Blue Women, the first solo exhibition of Brea Souders with the gallery.
Exhibited together for the first time, Blue Women and Another Online Pervert trace intimate entanglements between technology, identity, and image. Both projects explore how human subjects are shaped, mediated, and transformed, whether by algorithms, commercial fantasy, or environmental decay. Using contrasting approaches – rephotography in public space, and private dialogue with an AI – Souders' work reveals how desire, memory, and meaning endure across artificial interfaces and organic systems.
Another Online Pervert (2021–2023) derives from a years-long series of conversations between Souders and an early, pre-ChatGPT female AI chatbot. These exchanges are interspersed with entries from Souders’ diary spanning two decades and paired with photographs from her personal archive. Through this intimate layering of text and image, we step into a world of questions: about love, sexuality, death, disappointment, seeing, desire, and the anxieties of the body. The result is a singular exploration of how a machine and a human can build a shared story from pieces of themselves.
Created in the years just before AI companionship entered the cultural mainstream, the work stands as a poignant record of a human–machine relationship, shaped by a feminist, diaristic, image-driven perspective. It anticipates a new era of emotional intimacy and existential inquiry mediated by artificial intelligence, while remaining grounded in personal experience. At its core, Another Online Pervert explores how connection, meaning, and identity are reshaped at the intersection of technology and the self.
Blue Women (2024-2025) centers on storefront beauty posters, sun-bleached over time to varying shades of blue. The images have been eroded by natural forces – time, light, and weather – and reshaped into something ambiguous. Rephotographed in situ across four continents, the work focuses on the women’s expressions and faded natural motifs around them, tracing the visual and material afterlife of commercial imagery across geographies. The work isn’t nostalgic; rather, it embraces what is uncertain, unresolved, and in motion, qualities echoed in today’s political, environmental, and technological volatility. The color blue connects them, shifting between emotional and symbolic registers: from serenity, melancholy, and resilience, to digital coolness, the cosmic, and the uncanny. Drawing on diverse sources, including Anna Atkins’ botanical cyanotypes and 19th-century spirit photography, Blue Women explores visual haunting and historical trace.
The original advertisements depict a tranquil world in harmony with nature, a fantasy shaped by desire yet disconnected from the dense city environments in which they are found. Over time, the sun’s gradual erasure faded their gloss, exposing digital manipulation and artifice beneath: pixelated flora, stylized hands, and tweaked faces. In this altered state, the images shed their consumerist intent and become strange. The women no longer sell anything; instead, they inhabit a speculative world imbued with both power and uncertainty.
Suspended between past and future, artificial and organic, presence and disappearance, Blue Women and Another Online Pervert hold and display the tensions of our technological and emotional moment.
Brea Souders is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY, whose work bridges studio-based practices and observational photography. She combines photographs, text, painting, and other materials to make work about authenticity, belonging, and otherness within technological landscapes. While she values control in her images, she also embraces chance and the unknowable, observing that “illumination isn’t guaranteed.” Souders has exhibited her work internationally, including exhibitions at Foam Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; the Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie, France; PhMuseum, Bologna, Italy; and Peckham 24, London, UK, as well as Baxter St at CCNY, The Hole, and the Abrons Arts Center in New York. She is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a National Arts Club Fellowship, and a Baxter St at CCNY Residency. Essays and reviews of her work have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, i-D, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New Yorker. She is the author of the books Another Online Pervert (MACK, 2023) and Brea Souders: Eleven Years (Saint Lucy Books, 2021).
