"Using his body and landscape as points of departure, his mixed-media photographic works combine illusion and pseudo-biographical narrative to explore the instability of memory and the pull between things familiar and foreign."
Allyson Purpura
The Farthest Point brings together new and recent works by the internationally recognized photo-conceptual artist Allan deSouza. Born in Nairobi in 1958 and of south Asian descent, deSouza moved to England with his family while still a child. He studied at the Bath Academy of Art and at Goldsmith’s College in London and was a key figure in the black British arts movement in the 1980s.
Best known for creating images of elusive sensuality, much of deSouza’s work explores the conditions and consequences of being “placed” in racial, sexual, and temporal frames. Using his body and landscape as points of departure, his mixed-media photographic works combine illusion and pseudo-biographical narrative to explore the instability of memory and the pull between things familiar and foreign. In doing so, the artist probes our own attachments to the idea of “authentic” places, histories, and identities. Allan deSouza lives and works in San Francisco, where he is assistant professor of New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute.
- Allyson Purpura