Film Electric (2012 - 2018)
The starting point for Brea Souders’ Film Electric series is her personal cache of photographic negatives ranging from family and social photographs, documentation and visual note-taking, and her testing out of artistic and experimental ideas. Initially, Souders began cutting the negatives into pieces as a routine act of archive housekeeping, selecting negatives for destruction and disposal that she knew that she would never use in her artistic practice nor captured a distinct representation of a person, place, object or memory. As Souders cut into the film, the pieces would pick up static electricity and their forms began to bend and coil. From this discovery, Souders created Film Electric by arranging on a clear acetate sheet and photographically capturing her image fragments while they were held in fragile vortices created by the buildup of static electricity. The environmental conditions on that day, and the amount and the proportions of the negative shards that she arranges, determine the character of each work within the series, creating the overarching effect of Film Electric as a metaphor for the dynamic interconnectedness of information, its fragmentary nature, impermanent structures and unstable meanings.
-text by Charlotte Cotton, from The Photograph as Contemporary Art
To inscribe a photograph onto film is to build up — by chemical
processes — a reflection of a specific time and place. A ghost, on
the other hand, is the exact opposite: it is the entire content of an
individual life left intact, but stripped of its physical form, leaving
only the reflection. This exchange between layering and removing
is the core of Souders’ work: it pushes waist-deep into the murky
waters of the unconscious, even as it snaps reality sharply into focus.
The result is a body of work that is both occulted and illuminated
in the same breath, densely packed with weightless traces of history.
-Jeremy Haik and Dominca Paige, Conveyor Magazine
