On Saturday, March 18th at 2 PM, DVAA dives into the minds of Brea Souders and AI with selections from Another Online Pervert. The book derives from conversations between artist Brea Souders and a female online chatbot. Interspersed are entries from her diary and photographs from her archive. With this personal and provocative book, we are guided through a unique exploration of how a machine and a human can learn from one another and build a shared story from pieces of themselves.
2023 Salon Series: Brea Souders, Another Online Pervert
Through Souders’ chatbot conversations, we step into a world of questions: about love, sexuality, death, disappointment, the sky, seeing, desire, and anxieties of the body. Within the space of their correspondence, dazzlingly surreal and poetic tangents are combined with the material realities of the bot and its connections to capitalism, the future of technology, and the slippery divide between being and non-being.
Brea Souders
Brea Souders works in photography, text, painting, and collage, often blending digital phenomena with physical objects. Her work explores questions related to the human body, the psychological imprints of technology, internet culture, autobiography, and the natural world. Much of her work combines research, studio practice, and close observation with an active embrace of accidental occurrences and chance discoveries. Recent projects depict traces of human journeys through natural settings, which are, in turn, set against the backdrop of a culture where we may never presume to be off-camera or out-of-network. Her work often focuses on the slippages of understanding that inadvertently mirror parts of ourselves back to us, including our histories, current realities, and future possibilities.
Souders’ work has been shown internationally, including solo exhibitions with Baxter St, Bruce Silverstein Gallery, and the Abrons Arts Center in New York, as well as the Centre Photographique Rouen Normandie, France, and the Peel Art Gallery, Museum and Archives, Canada. She was a 2015 recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2014 Baxter St. Workspace Residency and Fellowship, and a 2020-21 Fellowship with the National Arts Club. Profiles and reviews of her work have been published in the New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Los Angeles Review of Books, ARTnews, 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). She is based in Brooklyn, NY.
About the Salon Series
This February, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance (DVAA) once again opens the doors of Krause Recital Hall for an enriching 2023 Salon Series. In the grand tradition of the “Salon,” DVAA invites the community to experience, learn, participate, and exchange ideas with artists, musicians, and storytellers. This 6-part series will take place on select weekends from February through April and is entirely FREE.
