Talwar Gallery is delighted to present Flotsam (1926-2018), an exhibition of new work by Al-An deSouza. They present viewers with a surfeit of what can only be called stuff, from plastic bags to boxes of chocolate, soft stuffed toys to paper takeout menus, cassette tapes to toothpaste––the flotsam that washes up and around a single human life. Based on photographs that deSouza took of their father’s apartment after he died, the works attest to the kind of informal archive that our possessions create around us––an archive whose logic is, often, opaque to all but the person at its center. The works––which are not direct, documentary photographs but what the artist calls “renderings,” digital paintings based on a photographic original––take care to retain an element of this opacity; as one approaches them, especially, it becomes possible to see that parts have been blurred, made illegible, even erased. These methods are, in many senses, a measure of the delicacy of the revelations made in the works––a person’s possessions laid out for public viewing, as if inviting strangers into his bedroom or bathroom––as well as the personal nature of the series for deSouza, for whom creating it amounted to a form of mourning. 

On first look much that seems to be junk––the “detritus of globalization,” in the artist’s formulation––the accreted materials do help to define the contours of a specific presence, a specific experience, even a specific embodiment: the shape of the body that the ghostly shirts and jackets of Trunk remember, the aches and pains referenced by various vitamins and ointments in Drift or Vitals. 

The decision also puts Flotsam in conversation with deSouza’s earlier series, The Lost Pictures, which they made following their mother’s death—although in The Lost Pictures, the photographic substrate was gradually broken down rather than preserved, as the dust and detritus of everyday living gradually obscured the childhood family photos while the artist painstakingly marked over their mother’s portraits, each mark sculpting a tribute. 

The continuity between the two series speaks not only to the artist’s sustained attention to the way relationships are strained and sustained across distance and time—but also to their consistent probing of the possibilities and limitations of the photographic medium. deSouza brings a similar sensitivity to each media, genre, and process that they use––from fiction to film, photography to painting––working across the gaps between them even while manipulating the conventions associated with each. Deploying a subtle, if often flaying wit, as well as a masterful knowledge of art’s histories, deSouza’s works ask viewers to become similarly aware of their own habits of looking, and the many ways these habits are mediated, circuited, reinforced, normalized –– thought, or allowed to go unthought.