(Robert Berman Gallery, Santa Monica) This is Alyson Souza’s first one person show, and it represents quite an impressive debut for this young artist. Souza moved to Los Angeles from New York three years ago, to, “be able to work and live in the sun year round.” Much of her work and psychic energy blazes and brews, transforms and transfigures itself in the mythic cauldron of the collective and personal unconscious, where darkness and light intertwine in an eternal dance. It is no wonder then that this artist, daughter of New York-based artist Al Souza, found herself drawn to the Southern California light.
In this exhibition, Souza employs her thickly applied paint to create realistically rendered, though surrealistically spirited images positioned inside custom-made boxes. Archetypal subjects and signs, such as The Clown, The Castle, The Cross, The Old Lady, The Snake, and The Curtain sit in Joseph Cornell-like boxes, several of them arranged into triptych configurations and/or shaped in the form of altars. As Souza poetically writes in her statement for this show, “the 3-dimensional paintings of carnivalesque mechanizations, bright colors and intense incongruity induce an encounter wherein the mundane seems oddly sinister, and vice-versa. This interactive rhythm plays throughout the work, gathering momentum with each piece like an accumulation of familiar, yet ethereal memories. . .” -Andy Brumer