faculty profile

Allan deSouza's photography, text, installation, digital-painting and performance works are subtle explorations of cultural transition, shifting easily between the material and the imaginary. While cross-disciplinary, deSouza’s works are conceptually linked by their emphasis on the discursive and by the siting of the work as a rehearsal or staging ground. Recent projects examine presence and the present as––in Achille Mbembe’s term––an “entanglement of absences.” The Rdctns (2011) series, for example, uncovers works by canonical, primitivist artists such as Gauguin and Rousseau to foreground the overlap between modernist ideals and lingering colonial fantasy.