Anastasia Samoylova

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My work explores the ways in which photography is used to illustrate concepts of the Beautiful and the Sublime in contemporary visual culture. Through my practice I examine photographic typologies of natural and human-intervened landscapes culled from advertising and public domain image libraries online. My research focuses on widely circulated nature-themed images that depict such cultural constructs as Nature, Environment, and Beauty, concepts that ultimately illustrate our worldview. From a compositional perspective, the work is an interplay between well-established pictorial genres such as Landscape and Still Life.

For the Landscape Sublime series I gather such images from the web, group them by the types of subject they depict, i.e. storms or cascades, print them out, sculpt into temporary installations, and re-photograph. In my compositions I give screen-based environments a sense of materiality. My photographs are situated between representation and abstraction, physicality and the illusion of a computer generated space. The found photograph starts out as a landscape and then becomes a still life comprised of landscape images.

Anastasia Samoylova is an artist based in upstate New York. Born in 1984 in Moscow, Russia, Samoylova moved to United States in 2008. She holds an MA from Russian State University of Humanities and an MFA from Bradley University. Her work has been exhibited internationally and included in the collection at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and ArtSlant Prize collection in Paris. Recent exhibitions include Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Griffin Museum of Photography, and School of Visual Arts.