EUQINOM Gallery in San Francisco is presenting "Blue Women," the first solo exhibition featuring artist Brea Souders at the venue. The exhibition, running from September 13 through November 1, 2025, showcases two interconnected projects that examine the complex relationships between technology, identity, and visual representation in contemporary culture.
The exhibition combines two distinct but thematically related bodies of work: "Blue Women" and "Another Online Pervert." Both projects explore how human subjects are shaped, mediated, and transformed through various forces including algorithms, commercial fantasy, and environmental decay. Souders employs contrasting approaches—rephotography in public spaces and private dialogue with artificial intelligence—to reveal how desire, memory, and meaning persist across both artificial interfaces and organic systems.
"Another Online Pervert" (2021-2023) emerges from years of conversations between Souders and an early, pre-ChatGPT female AI chatbot. The project weaves together these digital exchanges with entries from the artist's personal diary spanning two decades, accompanied by photographs from her private archive. This intimate layering of text and image creates a world of profound questions about love, sexuality, death, disappointment, sight, desire, and bodily anxieties.
The work represents a unique exploration of how machines and humans can construct shared narratives from fragments of themselves. Created in the years immediately before AI companionship entered mainstream culture, the project serves as a moving record of human-machine relationships viewed through a feminist, diaristic, and image-driven lens. It anticipates a new era of emotional intimacy and existential inquiry mediated by artificial intelligence while remaining firmly rooted in personal experience.
The centerpiece "Blue Women" (2024-2025) focuses on storefront beauty advertisements that have been sun-bleached over time into various shades of blue. These images have been weathered by natural forces—time, sunlight, and environmental conditions—transforming them into something mysteriously ambiguous. Rephotographed in their original locations across four continents, the work captures the women's expressions and faded natural motifs surrounding them, tracing the visual and material afterlife of commercial imagery across different geographical contexts.
Rather than expressing nostalgia, the "Blue Women" series embraces uncertainty, ambiguity, and movement—qualities that reflect today's political, environmental, and technological instability. The color blue serves as a connecting thread throughout the work, shifting between emotional and symbolic meanings: from serenity and melancholy to resilience, digital coolness, cosmic vastness, and the uncanny. The project draws inspiration from diverse historical sources, including Anna Atkins' botanical cyanotypes and 19th-century spirit photography, exploring themes of visual haunting and historical traces.
The original advertisements depicted an idealized world in harmony with nature—a fantasy shaped by commercial desire yet completely disconnected from the dense urban environments where they appear. Over time, the sun's gradual erosion has faded their glossy surfaces, exposing the digital manipulation and artifice beneath: pixelated flora, stylized hands, and digitally altered faces. In this transformed state, the images shed their consumerist purpose and become strange, otherworldly artifacts.
In their altered form, these women no longer function as sales tools; instead, they inhabit a speculative realm filled with both power and uncertainty. According to gallery director and owner Monique Deschaines, both "Blue Women" and "Another Online Pervert" capture and display the tensions of our current technological and emotional moment, suspended between past and future, artificial and organic, presence and disappearance.
The exhibition is located at EUQINOM Gallery, 49 Geary Street, Suite 417, San Francisco, CA 94108. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 12:00 PM to 5:30 PM. Additional information is available at www.euqinomgallery.com.
