Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Al Souza
American (b. 1944)
COWS (1979)
mixed media, c-prints
15" x 17.25"

STYLE: 70s PHOTOGRAPHY

  

Al Souza studied painting at the Art Students League and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, after first receiving a civil engineering degree. Since 1974, Souza has been producing “photoworks,” a term that he concocted. Souza does not make photographs. Though he shoots his own images, he has been employing Kodak to develop his negatives and to produce 'R-type (3 1/3" x 5") prints, creating a found image look. Souza does not intend his photoworks to be confused with fine art photography. In works like Cows, Souza makes visual puns to question how photography reflects reality.

Souza's work has been shown nationally and internationally in numerous one person exhibitions at museums including The New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC; La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; Dallas Museum; and, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; at university galleries -- University of California -- and commercial galleries such as OK Harris Gallery and Condesco/Lawler Gallery, both in New York City. His work was selected for the 1976 "La Biennale di Venezia" (Venice, Italy), the 1981 "Vienna International Biennale", the 16th "Sao Paulo International Biennale" (Sao Paulo, Brazil), and the "1995 New Orleans Triennial".

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Caryl Herfort, "The Perfect Situation," Dallas Observer, 2/11/88
"In some of Al Souza's earlier photographic works, the artist occupied himself literally with puzzles. Souza would take two jigsaw puzzles, printed with different images but cut out so that the pieces were of the same shapes and sequences, and, in a 'stop motion' arrangement, documented their integration, symbolically shaking all of the elements together in a paper bag and throwing them out, like dice, onto a piece of paper for contemplation...In addition to his exposure internationally and in New York, the Massachusetts native (and former professor at North Texas State University) has been exhibited in galleries and museums in Houston and Dallas...Souza's recent paintings...operate conceptually in the same way as the photographs. By employing a variety of seemingly unlike derived images (illustrations borrowed from textbooks, comic books, a child's coloring book, or maybe even the dictionary) and layering them so that the elements of each are forced to interact, Souza is again creating a puzzle. You could call it 'meta-art' (as in meta-fiction) and it is a game Vernon Fisher 'plays' on the grandest of scales..."

Sue Graze, Concentrations VI: Al Souza, Dallas Museum of Fine Art, June 1982
"Through his use of the photographic process, Souza scrutinizes what we generally take for granted, the veracity of what we see. The artist has chosen photography for his medium because it is commonly accepted as being the most accessible of all art forms. To question this particular method of recording reality is to question the very nature of perception itself...In addition to the inherent beauty of color photography, Souza's art grabs our immediate attention through its use of wit and visual puns...Originally trained as an engineer, Souza's involvement with art began when his wife was attending the Rhode Island School of Design. There he audited several of her classes, subsequently discovering his real interest, aesthetics and how what one sees affects what one perceives. As a non-objective painter in the late 60s, Souza explored the essential properties of a painting, its structure, form, color, and composition. The works he created were not unlike those of other artists involved with the Minimal Art movement, large monochromatic, textured surfaces ordered by grids...in 1972 he abandoned these formal abstractions and decided to pursue photography...to Souza it was as radical a departure as he could make--the medium that represents and records reality yet is apart from it...Using Kodak drugstore color prints the artist began to investigate methodically what kind of information we derive from photography and how it subtly and irrevocably alters its subject. The question of whether photography accurately conveys color, scale, value and texture intrigued the artist. Souza's conclusion--photography is a series of lies...By photographing in color various objects such as beads or children's colored pencils, organizing the images in a grid pattern, and incorporating both the grids and the actual objects into a simple wood shadowbox frame Souza began to analyze visually and intellectually the deceitful nature of photography. The artist's use of children's toys and trinkets as specific visual reference is clearly not without purpose...only through communicating with his own two children did Souza realize the significance of context and how the alteration of context changes the content and meaning of an image. It is as if context is the code and once this code is broken new levels of significance become clear...Most recently Souza has returned to aspects of traditional painting, incorporating small hand-painted canvases within his photo-boxes."